


Neat Little Bow

by thecaralong



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, M/M, Not A Fix-It, Spider-Man: Far From Home (Movie) Spoilers, Spoilers for Endgame, THANOS VOICE reality can be whatever i want, canon compliant with Far From Home, shameless fluff, shameless fluff with moments of horrible pain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-16
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-03-06 06:40:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 33,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18845689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecaralong/pseuds/thecaralong
Summary: Tony Stark cares about the kid 1) more than he thinks he does, and 2) more than he should.This isn't a platonic story and this isn't a story about the two of them getting together. There's a little gray area in there and that's where I operate.This takes place afterSpider-Man: Homecomingand fills in the gap (with fluff) before eventually following the events ofAvengers: Infinity WarandAvengers: Endgameand beyond. The final section is set 12 years afterSpider-man: Far From Homeand involves a romance between Peter and Morgan.





	1. Chapter 1

He was Tony Stark, so she wasn't expecting 100% of his attention, but Pepper could usually get around 90% on a date night. “We said no work.”

“It's not work,” he protested, still smiling as he hit the power button and his phone went dark. She noticed he set it down next to his plate, and not back into his pocket. “We said no work. I keep my word. It wasn't work.”

“And we definitely said none of that _other stuff_.”

Tony nodded. “You said that, and I agreed, because I love you.”

“Because you love me,” she echoed, nodding back at him.

“I mean, if you want to get technical...”

“I do. I do want to get technical.”

“It was sorta maybe a little related to the _other stuff_ , but...”

“Tony, my salad is perfect. This pinot is...one of a kind. I have never had squash this good. Why are you trying to ruin my night?”

Tony sighed. He swiped at his phone and then projected the image for her to see. It was a photo of Peter Parker with his head in a lion statue's mouth, pretending like he's being eaten. His mouth was open like he was screaming and he had smeared something red on his neck.

“Well, it's not work,” Pepper conceded.

“Like I said.” Tony set his phone down again. “I don't know why he's bothering me with this. I'm a very busy billionaire fiance.”

“Maybe he needs Iron Man's help. You know, with the lion.”

“See that's another thing to complain about. The kid has a lot to learn but he's certainly capable of webby-thinging an animal's mouth shut. So I'm not even really sure what he's going for here. Where's the artistic vision? Where's the internal logic?”

The phone dinged again, and Tony didn't hesitate to check the text. Pepper's eyes were wide with indignation but she softened at seeing Tony's unguarded smile, his momentarily unrestrained affection for Peter. “...Tony?” she prompted after a few seconds.

“Oh, oh.” Tony held up the phone for her to see, chuckling to himself. “He's a good kid. An idiot. But a good kid. Likes wasting my time, though. I never should have given him this number.”

In the new photo, Peter was pretending to run from the lion. His shirt appeared all torn up and the fake blood spread around further.

“He's really committed to the bit,” Pepper remarked dryly, taking a sip of her wine.


	2. Chapter 2

Tony met them at the curb and was glad he did. When only three people climbed out of the limo, he knew he had vastly overestimated Peter's inner circle. Peter smiled in greeting, then turned to hold the door open for his still-amazingly-attractive Aunt May. His friend Ned came around from the other side, and the three of them gaped at the sign above the door.

“So this is it?” Tony asked, gesturing at the street as if to ask if anyone was arriving by skateboard or Razor scooter or however the hip young people got around these days.

“I don't know about this, Mr. Stark. This place is really fancy,” Peter said, dazzled by the lights. “I don't think I could afford a salad from here.”

“That's why you're not paying.”

May laughed uncomfortably.“No one told me we were eating at Guillaume's!” She said through her teeth: “I'm wearing _jeans_.”

Tony stepped forward and took her hand, placing a light kiss on top of it. “You look lovely, May, as always.”

Then Tony quickly turned his back on them and sprinted into the restaurant.

“That was weird,” Ned said. Peter and May turned to look at each other in surprise. “Does he normally do that?” Ned asked.

Tony grabbed the maitre d's arm and handed him $200. “We need a new table, right now. A smaller one. A much smaller one. There's another hundred in it for you if the birthday boy never finds out about the original.”

The man smiled and nodded. “Yes, Mr. Stark.”

Tony met up with the party again as they came hesitantly up the front stairs and in through the glass doors. “Sorry about that. Minor mix up. Completely the maitre d's fault.”

The man turned and gave him a slight look of surprise before putting on an abashed expression and nodding. “My deepest apologies, Mr. Stark.”

“Yes, you're a disgrace.” Tony turned to Peter. “So it'll be just another minute or two.”

“People usually have to wait months to eat here, so I think we can wait another minute,” May said, glancing around at all the glitz.

“Do they have pizza?” Ned asked.

Tony walked over the young man and stuck out his hand. “I don't believe we've met. You're Ned.”

“And you're-you're _Tony Stark_ ,” Ned stuttered, wide-eyed. But then he got over his awe, leaned in intimidatingly, and whispered coldly,“ _I'm_ Peter's best friend. I will _always_ be Peter's best friend.” He pulled away and smiled, saying in a friendly and upbeat way, “Thanks for the dinner, Mr. Stark.”

Tony regarded him for a second. “Uh huh.”

A hostess came and gathered the group after another minute. She led them on a circuitous route, avoiding what Tony could see were bus boys and restaurant staff carrying some extra tables and table settings out of the private room that Tony had reserved for the party. They came around the other side to enter and the room had been put back together perfectly, with a small table suited for five (rather than 15) set up in the middle.

May laughed when she saw the birthday decorations – balloons and a banner and a few streamers here and there. “You're putting me to shame.”

The waiter came in to introduce himself just as Peter, May, and Ned sat down around the table. Tony put his hand on the waiter's shoulder to get his attention. “Be sure and take good care of these folks.” Tony turned to Peter. “Happy 16th, kid.”

“Oh...you're not-you're not staying?” Peter asked, turning two puppy dog eyes up at him. Tony had a golden retriever as a kid – Mac. Best dog that ever lived. That dog died of heart disease because Tony couldn't ever say no to him. His dad had been right, all those times he told him not to share his bacon. That was one thing Howard Stark had definitely been 100% right about. Peter and Mac were kindred souls or something. Same eyes. Same goddamn eyes and the same pathetic little sad whimper.

“Uh, no. Happy's holding the limo for me. I've got, you know...There's stuff I've got to do. So you have a good one, OK?” Tony quickly turned his back and walked out, but May caught up with him before he reached the lobby door.

“I know you're busy, Mr. Stark. Your time is worth thousands of dollars a minute, or something insane like that. I know. But it would mean the world to Peter if you would stay. Even just for appetizers? He looks up to you so much.” May laughed in mock frustration: “He won't shut up about you!” Her smile faded: “And I'm really glad that he listens to you because you've survived so long, doing what you do. And I-I worry so much about him. But it makes me feel so much better knowing you're looking out for him, ...because I don't know what I would do if-”

Tony held up a hand to stop her emotional outburst. “OK, OK. I'll stay.”


	3. Chapter 3

“WM-E1. What's this?” Rhodey pointed to the black label underneath a small metal door on a long wall of metal doors. “This is new.” They were at the Avengers complex upstate. Rhodey had been in Washington for a few months, and hadn't been back here in a while. Tony had clearly been as busy as ever, despite promises to Pepper that he was getting out of the game. Rhodey was glad that Tony couldn't stop perfecting perfection, not that he would ever say that to Pepper's face.

Tony glanced over from his work station. “Oh, just a few emergency measures. Parachutes, torpedoes, things likes that.”

“WM. War Machine? Is this for me? WM-E2. WM-E3.”

“Yep.”

Rhodey slid his eyes over the bank of emergency measures. “SP-31. Is that the kid?”

“Uh, yeah, yeah. Those are for the kid.”

“31?”

“Mm hmm.”

“31 for the kid, 3 for me?”

Tony made a dismissive gesture. “He's still learning the ropes.”

“Uh-huh.” Rhodey could tell that Tony was growing uncomfortable under his scrutiny. “I understand a _few_ extra, but...” From what Rhodey had seen, the kid could handle himself pretty well. “I'm the one who is paralyzed from the waist down.”

“He's just, he's very...he's not a planner, you know? He's all heart, and just kind of throws himself in there, and...well...anything could happen, you know?”

“I know you feel responsible. But you didn't bring him into this. If something had happened to him in Germany? Sure. But he was going to be doing this with or without your...attentions. If something happens to him now, that's not on you.” But Rhodey knew if there was something for Tony to feel guilty about, he _would_ feel guilty about it.

“I just want him to be...safer.”

“10x safer than me,” Rhodey pointed out.

“Is this gonna be a thing?”

“I just didn't realize I was in competition with the kid. Is he your best friend now? Do I need to give back the heart necklace you gave me?"

“If you're gonna cry, can you leave the room? I'm trying to work.”


	4. Chapter 4

Tony hadn't really been sure if Pepper would go for it. Fiji for Christmas? OK. But inviting the Parkers to come along? That was a big ask. But Pepper had been all for it. She made a joke about Tony fully embracing his “father figure role” and making all of his parenting mistakes on Peter rather than their first born. His heart soared to hear her talking about their own child in more specific terms than she ever had before. But he could understand her reluctance in parenthood as much as her reluctance in agreeing to marry him. He did reek of the qualities of a man who went on to make all the same mistakes his father had made.

May was beside herself with delight. She and Pepper had already become fast friends. You could cut their mutual respect with a knife it was so thick.

Peter made himself comfortable on the jet, kicking back with a...can of Hi-C?

“That's my seat,” Tony said, coming up behind him and knocking his feet back down to the ground. Peter scrambled out of it and found another spot across the aisle. “Sorry, sir.” Peter was beaming: “I can't believe I'm going to Fiji! The only time I've been out of the country before was when we went to Germany. But _Fiji_!"

Tony felt Peter's gratitude like a stab in the chest. He didn't like that feeling, when you did so little for a person but they acted like you had given them the moon. It made you want to actually give them the moon...

The flight attendant came down the aisle and asked Peter if he wanted anything. Peter looked at Tony in a panic.

“Snacks?” Tony suggested. “A cold towel? An Advil PM?”

“Do you have...chips?”

“What kind would you like?” the woman asked.

“...Doritos?”

“Certainly. Nacho Cheese?” Peter nodded eagerly and his eyes filled with excitement, like a dog wagging his tail for a treat.

“Don't drool on the carpet,” Tony warned, as the flight attendant went to the back of the cabin.

“Is this what a mistress feels like?” Peter asked, pulling expensive headphones out of the compartment next to him.

“Never make that comparison again. But yes, probably.”

“Private jets and trips to Fiji?”

“I think they're all in it for the Nacho Cheese Doritos, actually. And you've got it easier than a mistress. They have a job to do. You're getting a free ride.”

“I don't suppose fighting crime counts? Saving New York?”

“You saved maybe a _part_ of New York. Anyway, the reward for saving New York is shawarma. ...And a number of pending lawsuits.”

  
*/*/*

If it had just been him and Pepper, Tony would have booked a private island. But for their foursome, that might have been a little...odd. The exclusive resort would be private enough and give Peter some more options for socializing.

“The water is so blue!” May screamed, running to the window of their villa. She pulled Peter into a tight hug while he laughed and hugged her back, like a couple of farmers who had just won at the slots.

The staff of the resort had put up a Christmas tree and a few other holiday garnishes. Pepper looked around with approval and then smiled warmly at Tony. Peter had been wearing his bathing suit ever since they left New York; he had stripped off his shirt, tossed it to the floor, and was already running out the door for the beach.

“Sunscreen!” May shouted after him. “You need a towel!” She turned to Tony: “Are there sharks?”

“It's really the jellies you need to worry about.”

Pepper put a comforting hand on her shoulder and led a wide-eyed May towards their luggage to look for the lotion. Whether the superpowered, possibly radioactive Peter actually needed it or not was not debated.

Tony took a few steps towards the window and watched Peter running through the sand; he was nearly at the surf already. Tony had to smile: the kid knew how to take a bite out of life. Tony _was_ going to read, but ended up in the water with Peter, splashing sea into each others faces, playing proverbial and literal catch, and trying to pick up boogie boarding.

“You're very bad at this,” Peter said.

“That sounds like the attitude of someone who wants to be sent home. Besides, I can fly around in a metal suit. I don't need to be able to coast a few feet on a wooden board.”

“But I _am_ better at it than you. I think you should admit that. I think that's only fair.”

“Yes, congratulations. You're a first rate coaster.”

“Hey, I can fly too, remember.”

“It's not really flying, though, is it? It's more like swinging. Like Tarzan. _Or a monkey_.” Tony let out a wild ululation in the style of Tarzan's jungle call, which sent Peter into a (slightly resentful) fit of hysterics. Instead of falling back into the water laughing, he backflipped into the water, garnering an impressed nod from Tony.

Pepper shifted her umbrella, noticing the sun had moved. She put on her sunglasses so she didn't have to squint when she looked at the two boys and laughed when she saw they were chasing each other around. “I've honestly never seen him have this much fun for this many hours in a row.” She and May were lying out, and she might have even taken a nap for the first time in she couldn't remember how long. “It takes a lot for him to actually forget all the weight he's carrying around.”

“I think Peter was starting to get an ulcer,” May joked. “They both needed a vacation, I'm sure.”

“Peter is really humanizing Tony, I think. Bringing him back down to Earth.”

May rolled over. “I doubt it. Peter worships him like a god.”

 

*/*/*

Tony and the others found themselves waiting for Peter to finish getting ready so they could leave for dinner. “Yo, Parker! What is the hold up?” Tony shouted through Peter's bedroom door, banging on it. He sent May and Pepper off in advance to order to drinks. “If I wanted this kind of aggravation in my life I would already have a kid,” Tony said as Peter finally came through the door.

“Well, you did adopt a sixteen year-old.”

“Touche,” Tony admitted. He peered at Peter, lifting his eyebrows.

“What?” Peter asked, growing self-conscious.

“You were in the shower for a long time.”

“What? No I wasn't. What? It was a normal amount of time.” He added tardily: “For someone who used conditioner.”

“Conditioner, huh? I can't believe you kept us all waiting just so you could get your rocks off.”

“What? No! What?” He was turning a becoming, indignant red.

“I get it. Lots of pretty girls around, lots of swimsuits.”

Peter let out a desperate sigh and stared at the ceiling, pleading for help from heaven.

 

*/*/*

Tony caught sight of something out of the corner of his eye. The open window was perpendicular to his desk, and by the time he turned his head to look, it was gone. A bird, probably – there were thousands of them. He typed a few more words, and did a calculation. And it happened again. Some big-ass tropical bird. Or more likely...

Tony made sure his document was saved and then went around to the door and peeked out at the porch. Peter was sitting there fidgeting boredly with a book he had been assigned to read over his break. Peter hadn't noticed him, so Tony went back around and ducked under the window. The next time Peter peered in, Tony popped up and gave the kid the scare of his life.

Peter walked over to the door, his hand on his heart.

“You OK, kid? You gonna have a heart attack?” Peter waved away his (semi-serious, mostly joking) concern, but was still breathless. “What are you doing hanging around here?” Tony demanded. “I thought you were going to snorkel or something?”

“I want to go with _you_. Are you done yet?” he whined.

Tony sighed. “It's been an hour. I said I needed at least four. So no, I'm not done yet. I own a multi-billion-dollar company. I've got work to do.” Peter made an utterance of disapproval. “You think I would rather be doing this?” Tony asked him. “It's called adulting.”

Peter waved the book at him, as if to say “I can adult too”.

Tony picked up a Frisbee that was in a pile of toys next to the window and threw it down towards the beach. “Fetch, boy. Fetch!”

 

*/*/*

“♫ If you like piña coladas, m m m m m mmm. If you're not into yogaaaa. M m m m m mmm. If you like making love at mi-idniiiiight, let us doooooo the escape ♫ ”

Tony heard some kind of weird buzzing sound and was worried there was a wasp inside the room, then he realized Peter was back and he was humming. He started singing under his breath, and clearly knew less than half the lyrics, and didn't even know the lyrics he thought he knew. “Let us do the escape?” Tony asked, the knitting of his brow almost painful in its steepness. He was never going to get any work done.

“That's not right?”

“There's nothing right about it. Possibly – _possibly_ \- a single word.”

“It's an old song. How am I supposed to know all the words?”

“It's a classic.”

“That just means it's old.”

“Parker, that's it. Pack your bags. I'm sending you home. Coach.”

 

*/*/*

The women went in for some kind of wine-tasting-slash-stargazing boat event which left Peter, who couldn't drink, and Tony, traumatized by stars, on their own. Tony and Pepper had had a private, romantic dinner the night before that had been lovely (and very rewarding...) but Tony was glad she wasn't going to insist on date night every night.

Peter had found some out-of-the-way Jacuzzi that overlooked the gardens and suggested that they kick off the night there. Tony had his doubts there would be much more to their night than that and possibly a trip to the island's arcade but if that was a fun night for Peter (which is probably was) then so be it. (It would probably turn out to be fun night for him too.) But then he met two young ladies about Peter's age when he made a trip to the bar for some champagne and he thought he might be able to give Peter something a little bit better than what the kid had had in mind.

“I brought you a Shirley Temple,” Tony said as he approached the hot tub, handing Peter the drink.

Peter laughed, but then took a sip of it: “Hey! This really is a Shirley Temple.”

“Drinking age is 18 here, son. Sorry. I can't have Aunt May chewing me out.”

The two girls came up behind him making sympathetic clucks. “Everyone drinks here, Mr. Stark,” one of the girls said. “They don't care.”

Peter gawked at them as they climbed into the tub on either side of him.

“Peter, this is Emma and Sophie. They're from Australia and are both first years at university.” Sophie was the daughter of some big Sydney actor, Emma was the friend along for the ride.

“Oh, hello. I mean, uh, g'day,” Peter stuttered nervously. “I guess it's night. So, uh, g'night?”

Tony snapped a photo of the three of them. “Proof for Ned,” Tony assured him. “But I _am_ going to send this to Pepper. Just to be above board and everything.” _Guys night out ;)_ , he texted along with the photo. “Can't have her coming along and getting the wrong idea. She'll think you're a bad influence on me."

The four of them talked for a while. The girls were surprisingly informed about current events and had lots of opinions about Sokovia and the accords, which, for some reason, is what they thought Tony would want to talk about. For Tony it was about the sorest subject there was, unless they wanted to talk about when his dad missed his ninth birthday party.

They seemed to like Peter well enough – and why wouldn't they? - but were clearly more interested in the Avenger with the big bank account. Tony could see that Peter was just bursting to tell them he was Spider-man to impress them, so Tony had to intervene so he would realize he didn't need to impress them: “Emma here says she would be happy to help you out with your little problem.”

“My problem? What problem?”

“Your virginity problem.”

He was already flushed from the hot water, but Peter turned an even brighter red. He coughed and his voice did that adorable squeaky thing: “I, uh, I don't-What?” Had Tony arranged this whole situation just to hear his voice do that thing? It was possible.

Peter didn't bother suggesting that he wasn't actually a virgin, which Tony respected.

“You don't need to be embarrassed,” Emma assured him. She brushed some of Peter's hair out of his face and then slid her hand down his cheek. “I might have even done it for free.”

“You're paying them?” Peter screeched. He politely tucked Emma's hand away and swam across the tub to the other side where Tony was sitting. In a lower voice he cried, “She's a prostitute?”

“No, no. Just an opportunist! She's quite a girl. And very pretty. You won't find prettier on the island.” Emma overheard and gave Tony a radiant smile. “Besides, I'm used to throwing money around. It's just how my kind gets stuff done. And I wanted to give you a nice Christmas present,” Tony said.

“But, sir – you brought me to Fiji!”

“Oh that.” The truth was, Tony felt guilty. Because he knew Peter would enjoy the trip, but it wasn't really a _gift_ – it wasn't giving. It was a selfish thing: Tony wanted him here, with him. Perhaps even more than that, he was still easing his own guilt over how hard he had been on the kid in those first few months – lecturing, taking back the suit over one mistake, generally demoralizing him instead of teaching and encouraging. Pepper had said she wanted Tony to make all of his child-rearing mistakes on Peter – she didn't realize he had already started a year earlier. “I already told you to forget about that. Look, I just paid to cut through all the bullshit. We're only going to be here for a few more days – there wasn't really time for things to happen...organically. This way it's bing bang boom. Or bing boom bang, perhaps.”

“But...” Tony lifted his eyebrows to encourage Peter to divulge more. “...I guess I just imagined my first time being a little bit more...special.”

Tony shook his head and cast an exasperated look towards the girls. “He's a romantic!” Peter squirmed uncomfortably. But then Tony reached over and ruffled his hair, which surprised Peter into a look of wonder. “I can see you're bothered by the transactional nature of this. I respect that. Maybe just a blow job?”

“Oh, um...” Peter was much more amenable to this – _excited_ \- though reluctant to say so out loud. Tony pestered him into verbal enthusiasm before letting further events unfold.

Emma submerged herself and began pulling at Peter's swim trunks.

“Whoa! Whoaaaaaa, Nelly!” Tony yelled, grabbing Emma's foot. She popped back up to the surface. “Not in the tub! Sophie and I are sitting _right here_. Isn't that right, Sophie?”

“I thought you wanted to watch, Mr. Stark,” Emma declared innocently.

Tony hadn't blushed in a long time, but he blushed at that. He turned to Peter and assured him strenuously that he had never said any such thing. As for the truth of the matter...he was troubled that yes, he really did very much want to watch. It hadn't really occurred to him until Emma said it, but...He felt a...curiosity. Not _turned on_ , just curious about Peter. Well, it didn't matter. The age of consent might be 16 in Fiji but this would definitely be a crime of some kind in most parts of the U.S. and Tony wasn't going to get mixed up in any _weird_ sex crimes (or any sex crimes of any kind!) or give the kid (and possibly Pepper and May depending upon how bad their timing was) the wrong idea about what this relationship was or the kind of things he was into.

“I don't want to watch and I don't want this to become a jizzcuzzi either. There are some lovely bushes over there. I'm guessing it's not going to take very long.”

Peter frowned at the word “bushes”. But Emma took his hand and led him away like a lamb, and Tony waved goodbye to them like the cool dad he was pretending to be, coming across much more calm than he felt. He shifted a little nervously in his seat, not really comfortable with where his thoughts were tending or the fact that he was imagining what was about to happen.

“I don't suppose...” Sophie prompted eagerly.

“No, I'm engaged,” Tony shut her down. “But you're really very pretty, and if I wasn't...we would probably be having a different conversation.” Tony had no particular inclination towards someone as young as she. In fact, it wasn't at all what he preferred. But in this situation, he couldn't really imagine turning her down, if the circumstances had been different and Pepper hadn't been in the picture.

Sophie was pleased with this.

“So...heard any good music lately?” Tony asked her, tapping the side of the tub.

 

*/*/*

Peter and Emma came back about as quickly as expected and Peter was adorably giggly and loose. He had stars in his eyes for Emma, who would pat him affectionately on occasion. He made several mentions of possibly calling her and she finally had to sigh and tell him that it was not meant to be. Peter was a little crestfallen, but took it fairly well.

“Forgive him,” Tony said. “He's never had a girlfriend before.”

“I sort of-”

“You had a date to homecoming. That's not the same.” At this point, Tony was well-versed in Peter's love life, and had had good reason to think his gift would be well-received. 

“I wasn't talking about that. I was talking about third grade. Megan Spencer. I'll bet you didn't know about that, did you?”

Tony shook his head and sighed.

 

*/*/*

The walk back to the villa was a little awkward. Tony had relented and let Peter have some champagne, but he suspected that Peter's body metabolized alcohol pretty quickly so it probably didn't matter one way or another. But it pleased the kid. Tony had never seen him in such a good mood, and he was rarely in a bad one. “I can't believe you gave me a blow job for Christmas!” Peter exclaimed, kicking absentmindedly at stones and dirt clods that were in the pathway.

“You _cannot_ phrase it like that, and mum's the word, OK?”

“Right, right,” Peter whispered conspiratorially. “ _Mum's the word_.”

Tony had a feeling that Peter wasn't familiar with that particular expression. “That means don't talk about it.”

“Got it.”

“I don't mean-it's not like it's a dirty secret, OK?” Tony scratched his temple. “But it's just gonna be easier if May and Pepper don't find out.” He shrugged, palms out.

Peter rolled his eyes and then laughed at Tony, and for a second seemed much older than he was. “I get it,” he assured him.

“Uh, Peter, listen...I didn't mean to make you feel like...like you couldn't meet a girl on your own.” It felt strange to call him by his name – no tone, no nicknames. Despite the birthday party and the trip and all the time they had spent together, for some reason that was crossing a new line of intimacy that didn't leave Tony entirely comfortable. Maybe it wasn't intimacy...maybe it was something else. Control.

“You didn't. I am nothing but grateful, Mr. Stark.”

Tony had never told him to kick the “Mr. Stark” habit. And he probably never would. He liked hearing it too much. He had grown up calling his father “sir”; it created the proper emotional...boundaries.


	5. Chapter 5

Tony would regret thinking it a few months later, but at the time, he was wishing for some kind of alien-related problem to get him out of this conversation. Pepper's arms were metaphorically crossed, but in reality she was sitting rather comfortably on the sofa. She didn't need to throw her weight around, not ever, but especially not now. “Why don't you tell it to me again,” she said patiently, taking a sip of wine in that diabolical way she had of doing.

 

“Uh, well, so...” Tony coughed. “Peter and I were at the club. Having a steam.”

 

“Uh-huh.”

 

“There were some other guys in there, talking about the Knicks.”

 

“Ah.”

 

“And Peter was saying that he hadn't seen a Knicks game in years.”

 

“Tragic.”

 

“He's so busy. I felt bad for him, you know? It's the end of his winter term so we were celebrating. So I called around and got us tickets for that night's game. And we...we went.”

 

“I see. So you missed our anniversary dinner not to watch basketball, but to help out poor, unfortunate, suffering Peter Parker.”

 

Tony pointed at her. “Yes. That's it. You get it.”

 

“The end of winter term? You know, Tony, you don't need to make up excuses to see him. But if you're going to see him instead of me _on our anniversary_ , then you're going to need a better excuse than that.”

 

“His grades were _very_ good.”

 

Pepper sighed. “I know you would never intentionally stand me up, unless it were a matter of life and death. But I am pretty confident of my right to be pissed off in this situation regardless of _intention_. However, it has been a long night of waiting for you; and getting awkward, pitying smiles from waiters; and calling you, and not getting an answer-”

 

“It was very loud in there.”

 

Pepper knew Tony checked his devices with the regularity of breathing – unless he was having a really good time. She glowered and continued: “So I don't want this to be a whole thing tonight. I'll let you punish yourself. Just answer me this: should I be jealous of the kid?”

 

He inclined his head at her, scoffing a little. “That sounds like the kind of mean-spirited joke that _I_ would make.”

 

“I thought it was joke...” she said, gaping, “until I saw the look on your face.”

 

They stared at each other. Tony declared, outraged: “I'm not cheating on you with _Spiderboy,_ the underage wonder.”

 

“I didn't ask if you were cheating. I asked if I should be jealous.” She studied him.

 

“You wanted me to get close to him!” And he also wanted to remind her that he had, after all, met Peter while he and Pepper were broken up – _her_ choice. But that seemed like the kind of response that would dig him even deeper into this hole.

 

“I _wanted_ you to pass the baton! To someone you knew, and trusted. So that I didn't have to worry every night whether you were coming home or not. So that you could finally hang up that suit for good. And I wanted you to work out your issues with your father before we started our family. Instead I've got a rival for your attention. Me, your fiancee!”

 

“The idea of you being in competition with him is ridiculous.”

 

Pepper raised her brow. “It's ridiculous?”

 

“It's insane. Ludicrous. Comical. F.R.I.D.A.Y., more synonyms for 'ridiculous', please.”

 

“Never mind that, F.R.I.D.A.Y.,” Pepper interjected. “Tony, do you really feel like you can say that after what happened tonight? You forgot about me!”

 

“Yes, I can say that. Of cour-”

 

“If the kid and I were both kidnapped by some enemy of yours, and you could only save one of us, who would you save?”

 

Tony rolled his eyes at her. “It's not going to come to that. This isn't DC!”

 

But she didn't retract the hypothetical and he was forced to consider it. He caught her eyes, and inclined his head, saying softly: “Of course I would save you. You're Pepper. You're my family.”

 

Tony had told the truth, but it didn't feel good to say it. Consigning Peter to his hypothetical death sent a ripple of unease through him, as if the act of choosing and the thought of losing Peter were more than just some theoretical exercise. It was enough to make him feel sick. Turning his back on Pepper, Tony paced away from her, bringing a hand up to scratch his head and gesturing in a wide, confused way. “I thought I would give him the new suit. Maybe keep an eye on him, give him a few pats on the back, or words of warning. Call on him when I _really_ needed backup, like I did in Germany. Obviously... Obviously he matters more to me than that.”

 

Tony wasn't blind. The mentor/mentee relationship had clearly been superseded by a more profound form of friendship. A friendship he hadn't anticipated, and one unlike any he had ever had before. One he didn't entirely understand... He felt a hell of a lot more than just responsibility and an avuncular-type of affection towards the kid. If he was really being honest, his brotherhood with the other Avengers didn't even come close. This was the same – the same mutual respect, the same shared sense of responsibility, the same experiences with threats and danger... but it was different too – a different type of bond.

 

And it had happened _fast_. It had probably happened two minutes into meeting him, poking around the kid's bedroom and seeing right through his posing to the genuine heart underneath. And he had already spent enough time figuring out who the masked spider-person was, figuring out _what kind_ of person he was - _and_ designing the suit for him - that it was like he knew him already at that point. He was never going to forget what it felt like to see Peter slammed into the tarmac in Germany, not moving. Maybe he should have recognized something that day, early as it was, but there was too much else going on.

 

In the time since he had never been half as aloof as he allowed the kid to believe – subtly pumping Happy for near-daily updates on Peter's life and even reviewing footage from the Spider suit whenever he wanted a break from whatever else he was doing, which turned out to be more often than he probably cared to admit. Peter had worked some of it out, like when he asked Tony – through narrowed eyes - how he had known Peter had quit band, and exactly when. It was probably something of a balm to heal how harsh Tony had been after the ferry incident. Tony was sorry for all of it now – for acting like he hadn't been paying attention, for overreacting when the kid made the same mistakes Tony had made himself (and overreacting probably _because_ they were the same mistakes), for not being able to say “I just want you to be safe!” just like his father never could, for keeping his distance, and now, he supposed, he had to be sorry – towards Pepper - for not being quite distant _enough_ and paying _too much_ attention.

 

He paced back towards Pepper, taking in how vulnerably insecure and how fantastically beautiful she looked. “Missing that dinner tonight was the dumbest thing I ever did. And as you know, I've done some pretty dumb things.”

 

She allowed a hint of smile to cross her features. He sat down next to her and took her hands into his. “I don't want to marry Peter Parker. I want to marry Pepper Potts.” He couldn't resist adding, to lighten the mood: “Try saying that five times fast!”

 

Pepper mattered to him more than anyone. But she could never be his entire world, he wasn't wired that way. She knew and understood that. Just like _he_ knew she would be fine without him, if she had to be, and he was glad. (Mostly... There would always be that selfish sliver of him who wanted her to be miserable without him). Maybe it _wasn't_ ridiculous for Pepper to think that she and Peter were in competition. But they weren't interchangeable to him. They could never be substitutes for each other.

 

But maybe Pepper wouldn't find that as reassuring as he hoped... It did, after all, go both ways.

 

He didn't say it. He kissed her – which she accepted reluctantly, and then with more enthusiasm. But when he began easing her down onto her back, she shoved him off and told him he was going to be too busy that night thinking of ways to make their missed date up to her to have sex.

 


	6. Chapter 6

 

The dean encouraged the students to give him a second round of applause, and Tony bowed graciously to them. “It's a shame how much of your philanthropy is overlooked in favor of your work with the Avengers,” she said to him in an aside, covering up the microphone. “We're very grateful for both.” He gave her an appreciative nod. “And now we would like to open up the floor to questions,” she announced. Tony leaned in to the mic: “Questions about the _lecture_ ,” he clarified, because he had very little he wanted to say about the Chitauri, Loki, Ultron, Sokovia, Captain America, the accords, or any number of related topics that were inevitably on the students' minds when they looked at him.

 

A few hands went up, but the majority of the students seemed to be looking at their phones or whispering to each other. He saw the play of lights on their faces, and heard a few gasps. He turned to look at the dean, and she shook her head, confused. Then he heard the word 'Spider' from out in the audience. Tony took the stairs down from the stage three at a time and then leapt to the bottom. He ran up to the first row of seats and ripped the phone out of the hand of the first distracted student he saw. The boy didn't protest to find himself suddenly sharing his phone with Tony Stark.

 

Part way through his presentation F.R.I.D.A.Y had informed Tony that Peter was involved in some kind of dust-up. It hadn't sounded serious...

 

Tony hit the refresh button on a video that had been posted to Reddit. It was a short clip off someone's phone, less than ten seconds. It showed Spider-man web-slinging between two skyscrapers several blocks apart. He completed one swing, but as he went to shoot web to carry him to the next one, nothing seemed to come out. He fell hundreds of feet to the street amid gunfire of some kind as the other webbing failed somehow. The video had been taken on the street below – there was no doubt that Peter had hit the pavement with a tremendous thud, though the only sounds in the video were the guns and the horrified screams of the bystanders watching him. “Why isn't he getting up?” someone offscreen asked.

 

“How old is this?” Tony demanded.

 

The student was flustered. “I-I don't know. It was in 'new'.”

 

Tony dropped the phone to the floor on his way out, not even taking the time to hand it back. “Sorry!” he shouted as he ran for the door. “F.R.I.D.A.Y., call Peter Parker,” he said, suiting up as he made his way through the hall outside the auditorium and toward the external doors. There was no answer from Peter, and his suit was offline, possibly from the damage it had sustained from the fall.

 

While F.R.I.D.A.Y. was scanning the news for mentions of Spider-man, Tony took off flying towards downtown and the location where he had last been seen. Plenty of local stations were reporting that Spider-man had been in action, though no one seemed to know where he was now. That meant he had either been taken by whoever he had been fighting, or he had been able to make it away on his own. But at least that meant he wasn't being carted off to the hospital.

 

“Boss, I've reestablished my connection to his suit,” F.R.I.D.A.Y. reported.

 

“Parker?” There was no response, he demanded more urgently: “ _Parker_?” This garnered a moan. Shit. He was hurt, bad. “ _Where are you_?” F.R.I.D.A.Y.'s display was showing that his tracker was bugging out. She could only narrow it down to where they were already headed.

 

“Mr. Stark?” he asked, slow and confused.

 

God, the kid was really out of it. “I need you tell me where you are. Has someone got you?”

 

“Garbage,” he groaned.

 

“What?”

 

F.R.I.D.A.Y. chimed in: “Perhaps he climbed into a dumpster to hide. He activated stealth mode.”

 

In another minute Tony had reached the intersection he had recognized from the video. The crowd of busy New Yorkers had already dispersed, but there were police and caution tape where forensics were collecting evidence from the guns. F.R.I.D.A.Y. scanned the dumpsters in the nearby alleys for heat signatures and got a hit. “It's OK, kid. I'm coming,” Tony assured him, landing in front of the dumpster in question and throwing the lid open with a resounding clang. There were some signs of blood – or possibly old ketchup – on the edge. Inside, Peter was lying on top of the trash, his mask foolishly pulled off. The stealth mode on the suit was doing an OK job of blending in with the garbage – not that it mattered with his mask off. He was looking pretty beat up, worse than Tony had ever seen him. Tony had a thousand questions about what had happened but he held off for the moment.

 

“I just need a minute,” Peter mustered the energy to say, his eyes closing with relief when he saw Tony. “I don't need you to save me. Not hiding. Tactical retreat.”

 

Tony blinked too, remembering finally to breath again. _He was fine. He was fine._ “Don't tell the others I said this – I'll deny it – but there have been plenty of things I couldn't have done on my own. Don't feel bad about needing help.”

 

“They used some kind of chemical to dissolve the web,” Peter tried to explain. Tony shushed him and lifted him out of the dumpster.

 

“No, no, I smell,” Peter protested. “Just leave me. I'll be fine in a minute.”

 

“Yeah, you stink,” Tony said, pulling him more securely into his arms and engaging a harness as a backup. Then he lifted off and flew Peter back to the compound, calling Aunt May en route to let her know what was going on.

 

*/*/*

 

“Did it have to be a dumpster? You know I can't exactly take that suit to be dry-cleaned,” Tony said, approaching Peter's medical cot. The fall had devastated his body. He was on track to heal completely but it was more taking time than he was used to.

 

Peter tried to smile, but it was halfhearted. He was traumatized by the experience – the fall, the fear, the failure. “You know, we've all lost fights,” Tony hold him, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Me, Cap, Thor. All of us. We've all had our bells rung. We've all encountered enemies that surprised us.”

 

“I know,” he replied, nodding slowly. He pulled himself up into a sitting position. “I've just-never been this hurt. I didn't think I could ever be this hurt and now I know I can and-”

 

“And it's scary.”

 

Peter didn't answer.

 

“You're not a hero if you go out there and it's easy,” Tony told him. But Tony was about one more death scare away from telling the kid to return his suit and quit for good. They had all felt nigh-on invincible for a long time, but after what had happened to Rhodey, Tony was scared too.

 

Peter stayed for a few days. Aunt May visited, and brought him his homework. Tony took the school books away and they played video games and watched “really old” and apparently little known movies like _Die Hard_. Once Peter was a little bit more ambulatory, they went to the lab and tinkered with the webbing formula. Peter had lots of questions about everything else that was there, and no one had ever listened to Tony better when Tony told him old stories and new ideas. If only the kid was a little bit older – he could have worked at Stark Industries with Tony. He could learn the ropes, be there to carry things on when Tony and Pepper had had enough. Tony could pass _both_ batons to him. Well, there was still plenty of time for that.

 

Tony kept Peter there until he could no longer reasonably deny that the kid was fully healed. Peter seemed sorry to go, as much as he was ready to get back to school and his life. They worked up a plan for Peter's new foe; Tony wanted to Iron Man the shit out of these guys and handle the problem himself, but he stepped back and let Peter do it. He watched from the sidelines, worried and proud, as Peter did just that. They celebrated afterwards, with burgers and fries and vanilla shakes in the park.

 

“You know, I'd rather be here doing this than just about anything else,” Peter ventured shyly, but he was laughing and easy too. Sort of teasing Tony, sort of self-deprecating. Sort of perfect.

 

“You've got a sad life, Peter Parker,” Tony replied, but he was actually feeling goddamn butterflies. Did friendship make you feel butterflies? Maybe. _Maybe not_.

 

“Let me show you the best way to do this,” Peter said, pulling the top off of his shake and dipping a fry into it. He stuck it in his mouth with a self-satisfied smile.

 

“'Let me show you'?” Tony shook his head. “Parker, do you think you invented this?”

 

“You know about it?”

 

“It's not exactly groundbreaking stuff.” Tony followed the example with his own fries. “Yeah, I 'know about it'.”

 

“I thought it was a new thing.”

 

“It's old as dirt!”

 

“Like you.”

 

Tony opened his eyes wide with outrage and Peter stumbled back in his chair a little bit. “I take it back.”

 

“Yeah.” Tony threw a milkshake-covered fry at him.

 


	7. Chapter 7

“I don't see how you could say I'm not an Avenger,” Peter argued, chewing on a bite of apple, “when you offered to make me one. And I fought with you in Germany, didn't I? _I'm_ the one who walked away.”

 

Tony was fiddling with a new design for his own mask; he had carried it out to the balcony to work in the glorious spring sunshine while Peter reclined on one of the chaise lounges. He had been mm-hmming along skeptically to Peter's indignation, but he held the mask up to his face to test the peripheral vision and said, “You're not an Avenger. Because the neighborhood needs you.” When the Avengers were called next to do their thing, Tony prayed to God he wouldn't need Peter's help. Tony had felt he owed it to the kid to make him an Avenger after everything that had happened (and it wasn't like the kid didn't have the skills), but he was glad Peter was thwarting muggings and catching falling elevators, not throwing down with extinction-level threats.

 

“I'm just as strong as the others! The arrow guy? Come on.”

 

“You should know by now there's a lot more to these kinds of fights, and to being on a team like the Avengers, than how well you can give or take a punch. There are always going to be bad guys who are stronger. It's when they're smarter that you've got to worry.”

 

Tony noticed the shadow overhead but assumed it was a bird. By now the sound was so familiar to him that he didn't even notice it, but Peter did. Tony had barely looked by the time Peter had Pepper, who had been flying in her iron suit to land right front of Tony, webbed against the wall.

 

“Peter!” Pepper shrieked, flailing.

 

“Oh,” Peter gasped.

 

“Sorry, he's a little protective,” Tony said, laughing at her.

 

“I'm so sorry, Ms. Potts!” Peter exclaimed, running over to her to rip the webbing off. “I thought you were attacking Mr. Stark.”

 

“Maybe I was,” she joked, retracting the face plate once they had pulled all of the jamming web off of it.

 

“How's it working?” Tony asked her.

 

“ _It_ works fine. _I'm_ a little rusty,” she admitted, giving the iron suit a pat. Pepper wouldn't hesitate to hop into one of the suits and use it if the situation called for it, but she much preferred going for a peaceful afternoon fly. He was working on a design especially for her, but the current one she was in resembled all the others, making Peter's mistake all the more hilarious. ...And endearing. He was a good kid.

 

Despite the mix-up, she invited the sheepish Peter to stay for dinner. Maybe she was only being polite but Tony didn't let Peter say no.

 

“I thought maybe someone had stolen it,” Peter explained weakly, scooping up some salad for his plate. Tony patted him patronizing on the shoulder.

 

“I'm glad there's someone looking out for him,” she replied to Peter, smiling.

 

After dinner, Pepper left them on their own. “She doesn't have to go,” Peter said, gesturing too late at the door she had just walked out of. “Sometimes I feel like I drive her away or something.”

 

“Who, Pepper? She's an important lady. She's got important work-business things to do. That's how I got here, you know? By letting other people do the boring work-business stuff.” Tony was intently ignoring the reality that Pepper often did feel a little left out when it was just the three of them – not that it often was. But it wasn't like Tony wanted to go out for coffee with her and her friends more than every once in a while.

 

“She likes me though, right?” He sounded more than a little worried.

 

“Everyone likes you.”

 

“Even you?” Peter asked, lifting his eyebrows in a teasing way. Peter pointed at him, like he had caught him.

 

Tony knocked his finger down and handed the kid a very small serving of scotch. They took their tumblers back out onto the balcony, where the sun had just dropped below the horizon. Peter looked older than he had any right looking, with his sleeves rolled fashionably up to expose his undershirt and the taut musculature of his forearm, and holding the glass as if he did it every night, though judging by his reaction to the spirit, he had never so much as tasted it or anything like it before. He was more comfortable in his skin than he had ever been before, more confident. “When are you guys getting married?” Peter asked him.

 

“I've left the date-setting to Pepper. She's...taking her time with it. A wedding on this scale requires a lot of planning. It'll be a media circus, which means the venue has to be chosen carefully. Then you've got to make sure you invite everyone who will be offended if they aren't invited, because before you know it you've snubbed so-and-so with the Department of Defense, and now you don't get the contract, and you've snubbed the CEO of whatsit, and now he doesn't want to do with business with you, and your stock is plummeting. There's a lot to consider.”

 

“Am I invited?”

 

“You'd better be there.” Tony leaned back against the railing and crossed his arms. “Honestly, Pete – _Peter_ \- I'd ask you to be a groomsman if it wouldn't have everyone buzzing with all the wrong questions about who you were. After the ferry, everyone already knows that Spider-man and I know each other. There's enough speculation about who Spider-man is without adding fuel to the fire.” The way Tony had freaked out at the university lecture hadn't helped either - surely everyone in the room could have guessed it was not merely professional concern.

 

“No, I get it. And I know it's for my sake. It means a lot that you would have asked. I-”

 

Tony held up his hand. “No, we're not having a moment.”

 

“OK.” The smile Peter gave him in response was knowing and affectionate, and surprisingly sophisticated. He was impressing Tony again with how much he had grown. It was a non-judgmental smile too, and significant for Tony that Tony could push him away and Peter wouldn't hold it against him. Peter choked down the rest of the scotch; Tony didn't realize it was done for courage, until it was too late to block what was coming. “Do you ever think it might not happen? The wedding?” He coughed.

 

Tony gave him a sharp look. He studied Peter in the dwindling light; Peter was steadily avoiding Tony's eyes and trying to take another drink out of the empty cup. He didn't dare ask Peter if that's what he wanted; the answer could ruin everything. “Never.”

 

“I'm glad.” Peter sounded sincere. But maybe he was only _trying_ to sound sincere.

 

“Good. I love Pepper.”

 

“I know.”

 

“ _Good_.” The word came out stronger than it felt – he thought it might waver, might thump like his heart. He thought it might come out as a whisper, because for once in his life he didn't really know what to say. He had emphasized it as a warning, but his feelings were starting to twist him up.

 

Peter shifted his feet. “It's just...Do you think it'll change...this?” The kid finally lifted his eyes – they were wistful, uncertain, embarrassed. Everything he hadn't been 30 seconds ago.

 

_God, I hope not. I want more of this._ “I don't know. Probably,” he admitted.

 

“If you two have a kid, you're not going to have time to hang out with me, are you?” Peter ran a nervous hand through his hair. “I've got no right to say that.” After a pause: “But I'm saying it.”

 

“Don't you worry about that. You're gonna be Uncle Pete. That's what Pepper wants too,” he added. And he thought again, about how great it would be to have Peter at the company with him. Some way to always have him around, to see him every day.

 

Peter nodded, a little bit reassured. Tony should have still been worried about what this all meant, but his overwhelming thought was one of pleasure: the kid cared as much as he did. Didn't just care about _him_ , but about this time together, about their friendship as a practical part of his everyday life. Steve sure as hell didn't, _hadn't_.

 

Tony drove him home. The convertible top was down, and Peter was staring up at the two or three stars visible above New York City. “Half my life we've known about aliens but I still can't believe it.”

 

“I've been up there, seen them, fought them, and I still don't believe it,” Tony replied. He regretted what Peter would be up against when it fell to him; things were a lot more complicated than when Tony had first gotten into the game. He still couldn't shake the feeling of a looming threat from up there – someone with an eye on Earth, and how totally unprepared Earth was for it.

 

He pulled up in front of Peter's apartment building.

 

“Thanks for today,” Peter said, smiling and looking at his feet. He was fucking adorable and Tony felt his chest contracting, and not in the old usual millimeter-away-from-death, fizzing arc-reactor way. “I'm sorry if I...” he trailed off, and had obviously not meant to complete the thought out loud. Tony hadn't intended to be distant from him, but the kid was obviously picking up on something, an unease since their talk after dinner.

 

Tony's hands were still gripping the steering wheel; he looked ahead, out the windshield at a woman walking her dog and a man on his phone, who suddenly seemed very interesting and worth staring at. The silence went on a lot longer than it should have. It wasn't an easy silence – far from it – but it wasn't exactly awkward either. There wasn't pressure. They could have sat like that for a long time, but the longer it endured, the more it meant.

 

“I don't want you thinking-I'm not-I don't-” Peter exhaled loudly and gave up on trying to articulate what he was feeling.

 

“Take it easy, you're gonna have an aneurysm.” Peter relaxed back into his seat and Tony finally let go of the steering wheel. He turned his head a little towards Peter, but he still wasn't looking directly into his eyes. “Listen, whatever you think is happening, it's not happening.”

 

“That's what I wanted to say,” Peter replied eagerly.

 

Was that disappointment Tony felt? Just a hint of it, in the pit of his stomach? All of the conflicting desires and needs and principles were duking it out inside of him, a thousand prize fights. “I'm not talking about the future, things leading to things,” he clarified, with an overly-assertive tone. “And it's not just because of Pepper. I'm saying there's nothing here.”

 

Tony observed with some satisfaction – and also a twinge of regret - that Peter finally looked hurt. Peter said in a huff, “That's not-I don't-”

 

Tony cut him off. “As long you mean that, good.”

 

“I do. I mean, I'm not even-”

 

“ _Same_.”

 

They each let out the breath they had been holding and a look of understanding passed between them. It would be truly terrible to have misinterpreted what Peter had left unsaid, but Tony didn't think he had: they seemed to both be confused and resolved and relieved and disappointed in all the same ways.

 

“So...lunch on Saturday?” Tony asked, a little stiffly.

 

Relief swept over Peter and he smiled warmly. “Yeah.”

 


	8. Chapter 8

The thing that comes is worse than anything he had ever imagined, and Tony Stark finds himself defending not just Earth, but fighting for the lives of trillions across a strange and frightening universe.

 

 _It's not my fault. I didn't call on him to join the fight. I sent him back down to the ground. It's not on me._ Tony keeps trying to tell himself these things, but they're hurtling through space towards destinations and enemies unknown and all he can think is that it's a one way trip, and not only has he left Pepper behind on an Earth that he's not there to defend and that he's not even sure he can get back to, but Peter is along for the ride and along for the fight of fights with the kind of intergalactic asshole who is sure to take one of yours with him when he goes down.

 

If he goes down.

 

When Peter drops down out of the shadows to tell Tony that he's there, Tony is so angry he can't even see straight. Peter knows he'll be angry so he heads him off with flippancy, but whether it's anger or flippancy they're both just covering for how scared they are. Only it's worse than that: Peter isn't even as scared as he should be. Because Tony's there, he thinks he'll be fine no matter what. He'll help out like he did on the ground and Tony will make sure they both make it out alive. Tony will protect him, will take him home. That's what he thinks, what he _believes_. But this isn't like anything they've been through before, either one of them, and what happened on the ground – _when they lost_ – was just the opening act. What if Tony can't do those things? What if Peter dies because he trusted him?

 

“I was gonna go home!” Peter protests. “But it was such a long way down, and I just thought about you on the way and kinda stuck to the side of the ship.”

 

He's here for Tony. Tony hasn't explained the situation to him – the stones, Thanos, half of life about to blink out of existence. He doesn't know about the threat. _Which means he's here for Tony._ And the weight of it is too much. The kid is too goddamn loyal. Loyal to the death. Peter followed him to Germany, to face off against bona fide heroes, the likes of Captain America, just because Tony said so. And now he has followed him right into outer fucking space. The trust there, the eagerness to please and impress, was _shattering_. Tony quaked with how much he didn't deserve it and how much it meant to him. And how furious he was, because it was going to get the kid killed. A one-way ticket... Peter was going to die for what Tony had done to him, made of him, shared with him.

 

Tony is _wrecked_ by the thought of what might happen to Peter, and he wants to grab the kid and shake his shoulders and throttle him and demand, “Do you know what you've done to me?!!!”

 

Peter gives him a look – the slightest hint of a knowing smile - when he's talking about how intuitive the new suit is, like he thinks the suit was designed to bring them together, like the suit was designed to make him _feel_ Tony somehow. Tony can't help but glance the suit over – nanos hugging tighter than spandex but hard and fierce too. With the mask on, he doesn't look like the kid he is. And Tony notices – in a way he never has before – that the new suit he had made for the kid looks a hell of a lot more like Tony's suit than it does the red-and-blue getup that Peter had originally worn. Tony had worked gold into the design and the same shade of Iron-Man-maroon like he was trying to mark him, a brand of ownership. And that was on top of the nanotech's distinctive shine and the glowing power centers, echoing between the two of them in an almost complementary fashion. Despite all the people who would have benefitted from one, Tony had only made one other nano suit besides his own: the one for Peter. How many hours had Tony spent designing Peter's suit? Peter's looking at him like he _knows_ just how much time it was. And like he's the girlfriend who just got a customized engraved diamond necklace as an anniversary gift.

 

“And now I'm here in space.”

 

“Yeah, right where I didn't want you to be,” Tony replies, walking over to stand right in front of him. They're both buzzing a little with the closeness and even more so with Tony's dropped pretenses, his realness, and with Tony being willing to say exactly where he does and doesn't _want_ Peter to be. He knows he's talking about Peter like he wants him with Pepper, the two of them locked up safely in a little box, Tony Stark's little box of precious things, but he doesn't care. And he doesn't care that it sounds like he thinks he has the right to order Peter around, but he cares more than a little that Peter seems to think so too. Peter's got this “I-only-defied-you-because-I-wuv-you” puppy-dog look that is driving Tony crazy. And for one second, while Tony is up in his personal space telling him just how dangerous this whole situation is, there's not a single affectation or artifice or shred of a lie between them and its a little bit intoxicating. _A one-way ticket._ He's begging the kid to somehow undo this, to somehow be back on Earth.

 

Strange's cape is with them through all of this and Tony isn't sure how sentient it is, and what it is and isn't capable of, but he doesn't really want it _watching_.

 

In Peter's soberly defiant face, in his straightened back, and his scared eyes, Tony can see that maybe he did think this through. There's a mature young man standing before him, willing to make the ultimate sacrifice – for his loved ones, for the neighborhood. For Tony.

 

The worst of it is that there's a part of Tony, a selfish streak, that's glad Peter's here. He was alone in outer space and shaken to his core and there's something steadying about the kid's face and that squeaky/perfect voice of his. He's so familiar and warm and Tony had never needed it more. Like a security blanket or a teddy bear. As much as Tony wants to tell him to go hide in some shaft or flying doughnut janitor's closet, he needs Peter's help. And it's ultimately Peter's plan that kills that smug Cryptkeeper telepath and rescues the doc, though Tony only gives him half-credit because it very nearly gets them all killed.

 

Strange is just as much of an asshole post-rescue as he was when they first met only hours ago. “I'm sorry, I'm confused as to the relationship here,” Strange comments, after Peter pipes up to remind them that they've got back-up – _him_ \- and Tony tells him to let the adults talk. Tony crosses his arms defensively: the question hits a little too close to home. Is there any chance the cape can actually communicate with Strange? “What is he, your ward?”

 

Peter answers no, and neither he nor Tony give Strange any clarification beyond that. They don't have that clarification themselves. Tony takes a moment to think that Peter must have orphan written all over him, and that Strange was pretty quick to sense how important they were to each other.

 

He's not sure if he can reprogram the ship to take them back to Earth. And when he decides not to try, he's making the decision he has to make, not the one he wants to. He reassures himself that he'll find some way to keep the kid out of it, once it becomes life or death. He'll find some way. And for all he knows, trying to reprogram the navigation would put them inside of a sun – it's not like he had any experience with crafts capable of interstellar travel. Their pre-programmed destination was a safer bet than that. Of course it _would_ turn out that the best plan to save trillions of lives was also the worst way to keep Peter Parker alive. But if Thanos does what he set out to do, Peter had a 50% chance of dying anyway, so maybe this was better.

 

Maybe.

 

At least they have the wizard on their side, and Tony has to admit, the guy can do some impressive things. As far as he knows, Thanos hasn't gone up against anyone actually wielding one of the infinity stones that he is so hot to get his hands on, so maybe they stood a chance. The wizard being an asshole may or may not help: “If it comes to saving you, or the kid, or the Time Stone, I will not hesitate to let either of you die,” Strange tells him. Tony's not sure he's wrong but it really riles him up to hear Strange say that about Peter and he's not really sure how he _could_ say that about Peter, how anyone could, having met him.

 

Tony knights Peter as an Avenger, not giving it the ceremony the kid deserves because he can't bear to look at him, knowing the agreement he just made with Strange. But the kid had really been an Avenger all along, hadn't he?

 

He does it just as much for his own sake. Tony needs another Avenger with him, going into this.

 


	9. Chapter 9

They have some down time while the spacecraft takes them to wherever it's taking them – some planet called Titan, according to the navigation computer – but it's pretty much impossible for any of them to stop the adrenaline from pumping. Peter swings restlessly around the big belly of the ship until Tony yells at him to stop wasting web. They search together for something that might be eaten but what food they find isn't really meant for their species and Tony's not sure he could keep something _that_ unappetizing down, whether or not he was capable of digesting it. The hunger peaks and then goes away and they're finally able to wind down a little.

 

“At least I had a blow job before I died. So thanks for that,” Peter jokes, once they've slid down into seated positions against the wall of the bridge, the psychedelic spectacle of jump-travel dazzling them out the window. “If I had known _this_ was coming, I would have gone all the way when I had the chance.”

 

Tony realizes exactly how that sounds and turns in horror to see if Strange had heard, but the doctor was too far away, too busy. “There's got to be some way to verbalize that that doesn't unfairly make it sound like I should be in jail.”

 

“Well, I'm nearly 17 now,” Peter replied. The age of consent in New York, which Tony definitely hadn't recently looked up out of innocent curiosity. Peter doesn't say it flirtatiously, but he doesn't need to: the suggestiveness isn't subtext, it's text. But he's joking.

 

“Did that girl ever text you back?”

 

“Emma? She sent me a very nice...smiley.” Peter gives him an amused, self-deprecating look. Then he lets the lighthearted expression fall and he is deadly serious. “Look, if this is it for me, you know what to tell Aunt May. Say all the regular stuff. Make sure she knows I was thinking about her. Make sure she knows I was grateful. And you gotta help her, because she's not going to be OK.” A tear slid down Peter's face; he didn't wipe it away.

 

Tony wasn't so sure he would be OK either.

 

Tony has retracted his suit and the metal of the floor is cold underneath him, cold in his bones, in his soul. “I don't want to hear you talking like that. Say something else like that and I'm going to walk away. I'll shoot the breeze with the cape.” But Peter doesn't back off, doesn't smile, doesn't let him off easy like he always has in the past. Tony sighs: “You and me and May and Pepper are going to be having a barbecue this time tomorrow. ...Yeah OK, maybe the next day or the day after that, I'm not exactly sure how long this is going to take. But we're gonna get back, and we're gonna have a barbecue. Kebabs. And I'm going to let you tell the ladies about how you saved _all the galaxies_ all by yourself.”

 

By now Tony has told Peter the whole terrifying tale – the strongest being in the universe, hellbent on halving it, damn close to succeeding. He's scared shitless. They both are. Peter tries to nod, tries to imagine them eating kebabs under gentle saved skies, laughing about using something from a movie to save a time wizard. But the hum of the spaceship is too alien, too loud, too real. Another tear slips out – he's really a beautiful creature, that's what Tony thinks of him in that moment – and this time Tony wipes it away, with the sleeve of his hoodie. His palm lingers for just a second on Peter's cheek, followed by an encouraging grandfatherly pat that doesn't quite erase what came before.

 

He cried in front of Tony once before – after the ferry. Angry tears – hurt, outraged, ashamed. Restrained, of course, but still obvious. Tony had admitted to him since that taking the suit away might have been more tough than it was _tough love_ , but he still had never properly apologized for reaming him when he should have been teaching him, supporting him. Peter forgave him anyway, and turned out all right anyway, which is more than Tony had done in his own parallel situations with his father.

 

As Tony is pulling his hand away, Peter catches it and clutches it in both of his. “I know if something happens to me, you'll want to blame yourself. But-”

 

“Peter!” Tony censures, mustering up what he hopes sounds like his most annoyed voice.

 

He won't be stopped: “But this was all me - _I chose this_. I knew what I was doing. I've been doing this stuff for more than two years. I might be young but I'm not just some amateur. I'm an Avenger now: that means I'm not your responsibility. ”

 

Strange looks over, and Peter, embarrassed, drops Tony's arm like it's the hottest of potatoes. Strange, who is now safely out of earshot, doesn't notice anything. The good doctor looks back towards the steering monitors, which are lit up in a different way – different colors, different patterns. It means something but Tony forgets it as soon as he notices it. “No, we're not doing this,” Tony commands. He isn't superstitious... but he's superstitious about this. This is a bad idea. And if they have an emotional moment now – the big emotional moment they both deserve - and Tony doesn't find the courage to say everything that he needs to say, and one of them doesn't come home... Even just contemplating the regret and the injustice of it is more than he can handle.

 

“But if we don't do it now, we might never have the chance. If something happens to me, I won't ever get the chance to tell May how much I loved her. But you're right here...”

 

The ship hits atmosphere with a tremendous howl. Tony hops to his feet and gives Peter a short, acknowledging, totally inadequate shoulder squeeze before fleeing towards Strange in front of the window.

 

He can't help but notice how long it takes Peter to join them.

 


	10. Chapter 10

When the new arrivals take Peter hostage, Tony has a horrible flashback to Strange saying he wouldn't risk the stone to save him. These guys are jokes (not that Tony doesn't feel terror coursing through his veins all the same), but if _Thanos_ gets his hands on Peter, the kid is as good as dead. Tony pulls out his biggest gun to show that he means business and he's nearly hysterical when he makes his threat, but fortunately their leader can't shut up and the truth that they are also there to kill Thanos comes out before things get messy. Tony's angry that Peter got himself caught and relieved that he's safe in a jumble of emotions all surfing on the adrenaline high. He growls at Peter and pats him on the back, which probably gives him mixed signals.

 

With every ridiculous thing Quill and his confederates say, Tony can feel Peter looking to him to know what of make of it. They're a unit here, and Tony can feel Peter's trust and loyalty in every glance. He's half-tempted to let these space idiots do their own thing and distract Thanos while he and Peter make their own plan. But when Strange tells them that they have a 1 in 14 million chance of succeeding, Tony buckles down and tries to get them in line. He can't think too much about what Strange said, or he's going to lose hope, break down, be useless They're going to lose, and half of humanity is going to die. Happy, Rhodey, Steve, Bruce, Peter, Pepper – he can't lose any of them let alone half.

 

The wait for Thanos to arrive is worse than all their downtime on the ship. “You're looking at me the way May looks at me,” Peter protests. “I'm not breakable. And this isn't my first rodeo.”

 

“This is your first rodeo with an Infinity-Stone-wielding Titan who scared the Hulk back into his shell.”

 

Peter shrugs, but not casually. “I go out there every day by myself and I take what comes. At least today we're together.”

 

“I hate to break it to you, but we were always together, kid. Thanks to the suit I knew exactly what you were doing, exactly where you were. You were never out there without a lifeline.” When Tony says it, he doesn't mean for it to sound possessive or controlling...or suggestive of anything other than Peter's overconfidence, but it comes out that way, and Peter hears it that way. His mask is on, he retracts it and stares at Tony, but Tony has noticed the alien with the antennae listening in and he turns to her with his best “Do you mind?” expression.

 

“Can I touch you?” she asks Tony, her antennae starting to glow as she reaches out her hand.

 

“Uh, that's gonna be a hard pass.”

 

She reluctantly withdraws her hand, but Tony doesn't like the way she is watching them; she's too curious. Tony pulls Peter away from her reach and puts the kid behind him. “Is it weird that I think she's really pretty?” Peter asks, staring after her as she goes to stand by the chalky blue one.

 

“Must be a bug thing. Just keep it in your pants, Parker. For all we know Thanos could be here any second.” Tony's eyes dart around nervously, taking stock for the millionth time of what he has to work with. Not much.

 

“Sir,” Peter interrupts, speaking softly. “You could have mentored anyone. Why did you choose me?”

 

Tony takes a deep breath and turns his eyes to the kid. “It was that great essay you wrote for the Stark Internship application.” Peter half-smiles, but doesn't accept this answer. Tony lifts his hand to Peter and holds the back of Peter's head and neck in a firm grip. He squeezes, and nods at him with feeling. Peter nods back. He gets it.

 

*/*/*

 

If Tony thought he was hopeless after Strange's pronouncement, it's even worse after Thanos throws a moon at them. He takes a moment to think that if Thanos doesn't kill Quill, he's going to do it himself, because they might have actually had it – the glove, salvation, all of it – if Quill hadn't let his emotions get the better of him. ...All the more reason to lock it down. Peter acquits himself well in the fight – doesn't get himself taken hostage or killed, anyway. Tony's the one who ends up as the hostage, while Peter is off saving the others (in typical friendly-neighborhood-Spider-man fashion), but Strange surprises them all – including Thanos - when he trades the Time Stone for Tony's life. Tony has to give Thanos a little bit of respect for holding up his end of the agreement and letting everyone on Titan live.

 

At least for the moment.

 

“Did we just lose?” Quill asks, and Tony can tell he's even less used to it than Tony is. He thought his heart couldn't sink any lower but it does – so low that he has no snappy comeback. The only hope left is that Vision can somehow keep his stone away from Thanos, but there's not much chance of that now that Thanos has the other five.

 

He's been stabbed, and Strange, who is in just as bad of shape, gives him some quick advice about how to treat it. It hurts less than where his mind and heart are at, wondering which people in his life will still be alive tomorrow. When Peter finally makes it back over, Tony can see he regrets not having been there to help him – prevent the stabbing, prevent the trade. It wouldn't have mattered, he wants to say. _You did the right thing helping the others_. But he can't find the energy to say anything. They sit together for a minute, the same grave look on both their faces. _I let you down_ , Tony thinks, and he feels the beginning of tears stinging in his eyes. _I let them all down._

 

Peter helps him up to his feet, and is as solicitous and polite as always, despite their desolate situation. Peter holds one of his hands, the other is on Tony's back. _Hug the kid, hug the kid now!_ But he can barely stand. If only the others weren't here to see... But a part of him is also glad that he has plenty of company for the end of the world as he knows it. If he vanishes, and Peter doesn't, at least one of these ~~a-holes~~ very fine people will be able to get Peter home again.

 

It starts even faster than he would have guessed. They must not have been able to put up much of a fight back on Earth. Tony wonders which of his friends are dead already, killed by Thanos trying to stop the unstoppable. Vision, for sure. But maybe others too. Steve, Rhodey – they wouldn't have _quit_.

 

The bug girl goes first. Tony didn't know how it would happen, but she turns to dust and floats away on the winds of this sick planet. The big guy goes next. Then Quill. Then the doc, and Tony is surprised by how much that affects him. He thinks that must be it – that's four, more than half already. Peter made it, they both did. _Thank God_. But then he hears Peter call out to him in a voice that can only mean one thing, and suddenly Tony's despair is free fall. There's no ground beneath him, and nothing to hold on to. He doesn't understand the world anymore, because in a matter of seconds, Peter isn't going to be in it anymore. He doesn't feel his wound, he doesn't feel anything. His body is numb.

 

“I don't feel so good. I don't know what's happening.” Peter is jabbering and staggering in terror and failing strength. He throws himself into Tony's arms and grips him like a life preserver but Tony is helpless, useless. His big brain is useless, his suit is useless. He can't even find the words to comfort him. All he can do is hold him. Hold him and feel him like he has wanted to for years, though there's no joy in it now, only anguish.

 

“I don't want to go. I don't want to go, sir, please.” Tony's breathing is labored; the air is bitter. He can barely breathe at all. He lowers Peter to the ground but they mostly fall, Tony's arm under the kid's back and his other on his shoulder. Peter is dissolving underneath him. Slower than the others, almost like Tony is keeping him there, fighting it with his will. _Give me one more minute with him, one more second._ But he isn't trying to come up with a plan – there's nothing he can do to stop this. He's just trying to memorize the kid's face.

 

“I'm sorry,” Peter says. It breaks Tony's heart, the last piece of him that wasn't quite yet broken. They look each other in the eyes and Tony has never shared a moment like that with another person he loved, never had someone look into his eyes like _that_. Like...like this is it, and they both know it. There's a tether in his eyes, reaching out for Tony, trying to latch onto him. And for a second he does. It might be the most intimate moment of Tony's life.

 

And then he's gone.

 

Tony's hand falls through where Peter's shoulder used to be, and hits the dirt that used to be underneath him. Dirt and dust. He tries to catch it, any bit of it he can, but then it's all blown away, dispersed into nothingness. His ashes spread, a little too far from home.

 

"He did it," the blue one says. It's an unnecessary statement, but it's just him and her now, and the reminder that's he's not entirely alone is welcome. She sits down behind him, in the rubble. She's lost someone too, and there's something companionable about their mutual suffering. More than that, he can hear it in her voice – she feels as empty as he does, as empty as this dead planet. The silence is crushing; it was rarely silent when Peter was around.

 

There's dirt on his hand, but dust too. There's Peter-dust on his hand and he holds it up to his face as if that might do something, mean something, make him feel Peter's presence just a little bit again. But all he feels, all he is reminded of, is his failure.

 


	11. Chapter 11

It's been two weeks since the fight on Titan, and three days since what juice they had managed to squeeze out of the damaged fuel cells in Quill's ship tapered off, leaving them adrift in the ass end of _outer_ outer space.

 

Her name is Nebula, and she doesn't talk very much. (Tony would consider that a virtue in pretty much every situation except for this one.) From crumbs of conversation he picks up that she was a complicated ally of Quill and his gang, though her relationship with Thanos, who was apparently her _father_ , was even more complicated than that, if attempted patricide is any sign. Tony has a lot of questions that he doesn't ask – curiosity is like a drink of water in the desert of his grief and despair.

 

Not to be melodramatic or anything.

 

Whatever her relationship with Quill, the important fact is that she's familiar with his ship, which is apparently named the “Benatar”. (It's strangely reassuring that Quill had spent decades traveling the universe and still liked Earth music best.) The ship she arrived on was destroyed in the “moon landing”, and the Benatar fared only mildly better. When they reworked the fuel cells it seemed like there might be some hope of reaching civilization, but now it's oxygen that they're worried about, and he's wondering if they should have just stayed on Titan. At least he could have lasted a few weeks longer, and died where Peter died, instead of staring into the literal void of space.

 

She's a strange creature, and she fascinates him. Unbreakable and fragile at the same time. She doesn't know who she is yet. In another life, he might have enjoyed being around her, watching her, while she figured it out. He has the impression that she's relatively new to feelings. He can relate: he was new to feelings once too.

 

This all reminds him so much of that cave in Afghanistan... Pride and mistakes and karma. Only he's not going to be able to tinker his way out of this. He already tried, and it didn't work. It wasn't enough.

 

 

They've sent every kind of message and signal and wave they can. The recordings he makes for Pepper are mostly an indulgence. She'll never get them, he knows that. He tells her how much he loves her. He tells her that she changed his life, changed _him_. He apologizes, that she wasted so much of her life on a fiance who was just going to fail on an epic, universe-decimating scale and then die.

 

He's over his infection now, but things were looking grim for a couple of days. The Benatar has medical technology Earth could only dream of, and it's enough to save him, though Nebula's bedside manner could use some work. She asked him about Peter when she had him on the table, sick and helpless: “The one you lost. The boy. Who was he?” _To you?_ she leaves implied. She expressed as much curiosity about it as he had ever seen her express about anything – including whether he was dying or not - and he wondered if she had been impatient to ask, had been waiting for the moment when she felt like she finally could.

 

Tony didn't want to answer, but then he was afraid she would get the wrong idea if he didn't. “A teammate. A friend.”

 

She nodded, as if she understood in an oblique way, and then said in that ironically sultry voice of hers, “Family.” She gestured at the cockpit, at the assorted seats there. “Like they were.”

 

She was jealous; she wanted something like that too. Tony didn't care much for having his relationship with Peter compared to anything else, especially not those lonely ragtag idiots clinging to each other because no one else could stand them. But she was right about him being family. Tony hadn't thought of Peter exactly that way before, but he does now. Now that he has lost him, he knows what he should have known all along: Peter was family.

 

They both open up _a little_ more after that. They actually talk sometimes. She tells him about space, about Thanos. He realizes Howard Stark was a saint of a father by comparison, deserving of a #1 Dad mug or perhaps even a T-shirt. “What you've been through...” he says to her, after she tells him about one particularly harrowing surgery Thanos made her have. Her suffering, her weaknesses, her strength have all made her very beautiful to him. He wants to adopt her... or something. Mostly, he wishes her a better end than this.

 

“Gamora, my sister... it made her good. It only made me petty.”

 

She twitches when he pats her comfortingly, comprehendingly, empathetically on the shoulder, and then she relaxes into it. “Human interaction,” he encourages. “Or human/whatever-you-are interaction, anyway. It's good. Good for the soul.” She hasn't had very much of it.

 

They play games too, whatever they can figure out. Using something involving cups or folded paper, because there's not much else. Tony loses more respect for Quill daily by what he can't find on the ship.

 

One day Nebula places a device in his hand. “What's this?”

 

“Terran music,” she says.

 

It's a Zune, he's surprised to see. One of the first songs to come up is “The Piña Colada Song”, and it takes Tony right back to the trip to Fiji with Peter and May. It was part of the lunchtime playlist at the drink shack by the biggest pool and they probably heard it four times at least, sitting at the bar. Every time it came on, he ordered a round of piña coladas for the four of them (virgin for Peter), because it was inevitable that once you started thinking about piña coladas, you craved one. And now it was all one big jumble of sensation and memory.

 

His first instinct is to think about something – _anything_ – else. But there's nothing to do, and he has nothing but his thoughts. So he plays the song about a hundred times, imagining himself drinking a piña colada, and remembering him and Peter splashing each other in the pool, while Pepper watched on smiling. Him and Peter playing frisbee on the beach. Him and Peter hiking the cliff. Him and Peter collapsing side-by-side in the warm sand, breathless and laughing after chasing each other with a dead jellyfish. He got to be a kid again. Because of Peter, he got to be a kid again, for a time. He got to be the kid that he never really got to be the first time around.

 

So this was how Quill stayed sane in space; maybe he got some things right. The smurfette knew what Tony needed, the music does a lot for him.

 

He thought less of Pepper at first, because he still had hope. Hope she was alive, hope he would be reunited with her. His heart turned the loss of Peter and his failure over and over and over again. But there's less and less hope with each day. They ran out of fuel, then food, and next it'll be oxygen. This is the end now, an inevitable march towards death. He won't see Pepper again.

 

He's a lot weaker than Nebula is, and he doesn't resent the pity in her eyes or her now-caring hands that offer him the last of the food and help him stand up when he can barely do it on his own. The pity isn't misplaced, and it's probably one of her first experiences with feeling it. They develop a unique bond, forged by hopelessness and the enormity of space.

 

Hypoxia starts to set in on the 22nd day. He had dreamt a lot about Pepper and the life they might have had together – happy, peaceful, sustaining dreams. Dreams so good and powerful that they were almost real. And maybe she really did have their child inside of her, a little boy or girl. Morgan... If they had both survived Thanos, that is. But the oxygen deprivation gives him the opposite – dreams about Peter, and the life, the adulthood, that he was denied. Memories of watching him disappear. Dancing phantoms of all the things Tony should have said to him.

 

Nebula opens every door and cupboard, and brings out a houseplant and sets it next to him. “There used to be a tree on this ship. That would have been better.” He's certain it makes no difference but he thanks her. She won't last forever either, but he's definitely going first. In fact, he's not sure he's got much more time left. He records a last message to Pepper – it'll be the last message, he knows it – and then lays down and shuts his eyes.

 

 

 


	12. Chapter 12

Tony had thought Thor was impressive, but this Carol Danvers is something else. She uses her own body – whatever is _in_ her – to repower the fuel cells. That gets the oxygen converter back up and running – at least enough that he's not about to pass out anymore – and then she _carries_ the Benatar back to Earth. _Thank God she's on our side_ , is all he can think. But also: where was this chick when Thanos was wiping Tony's face with a planet? Where was she when it wasn't too late to save Peter? To save Vision and Strange and everyone else?

 

Nebula has to help him down the stairs, and he's embarrassed for Cap to see him like that, but he can tell by the way Cap is running towards him, by the look on his face, that he cares about Tony more than he had ever let on before. More than just in that general way that Steve Rogers cares about everyone because he's Steve Rogers. It ought to be momentarily gratifying but there's just too much pain. Tony is glad to see him, though. Glad that he's here.

 

“I couldn't stop him,” Tony says, still devastated by the failure. Amazing that 23 days of doing nothing but thinking about it hasn't made it better.

 

“Neither could I,” Steve admits, and Tony can see that, characteristically, he hasn't quite accepted it yet, despite his outward honesty.

 

Tony stops walking and turns to him, broken. “I lost the kid.” His voice is tremulous, he's about to cry. He's about to cry in front of Captain America. But he's walking on grass again – Earth, grass, home – and Peter is stardust. Why wouldn't he cry?

 

“Tony, we lost...” Steve leaves all the names unsaid.

 

He doesn't get it. Steve is thinking about Thor or Wanda or whoever might be gone. Thinking like a commander who lost good men. Half of them gone. It's sad, it's fucking tragic. _But Tony lost Peter_! Steve doesn't understand. _Peter!_

 

Tony is half delirious from starvation; his body is eating itself. He can't talk about the kid anymore or else he is going to start blubbering. He needs Pepper, but he's afraid to ask... But there she is. She made it. Thank God.

 

He gives one last look to Nebula as Pepper ushers him into the compound. Their time together is over, but there will never be anything quite like that in his life again.

 

*/*/*

 

He wakes up from what he thought was a nap to find out that Thanos is dead, the stones are destroyed, and that this is all permanent. He had only known Peter for a little over two years – a drop in the bucket of his lifetime - but the idea of world without him is almost unthinkable now. Unthinkable and unbearable. If he didn't still have Pepper and the others he didn't want to imagine the state he would be in. He's lucky – he's still got Rhodey, still got Happy. Steve too, though he's not sure they'll ever be friends like they were before – like he _thought_ they were – and he can't look at him without feeling anger. If Steve hadn't done what he had done two years ago – if they had been a _team_ and together when this threat came along – maybe it all would have turned out differently. Maybe they would still have everyone they had lost.

 

And yeah, maybe that schism is partly Tony's fault too but he's got a lot of self-recriminating to do and that's pretty low on the list at the moment.

 

He marries Pepper the first chance he gets – there's nothing left to derail it now - and it's so small of a wedding that it's practically an elopement. The idea of all those empty seats – everyone who should have been there but wasn't – is too much. _You'd better be there_ , he had told Peter. He doesn't invite Steve, but he does invite Nebula. She's a spectacle of adorable social awkwardness, but he can tell it's one of the highlights of her life that he wanted her there. Happy watches her with suspicious hawk eyes.

 

The wedding is full of more sad tears than happy ones but it's still the most special day of his life. Hearing Pepper say those vows – it was like his whole life had been building towards it. Morgan is born not too much longer after that.

 

Natasha, Steve, Rhodey – they don't know what to do with themselves. But Tony knows exactly what to do. He takes Pepper to a quiet house on a lake and goes about the important work of raising his daughter and making them both as happy as possible in this new, very changed, very miserable world.

 

*/*/*

 

The hopelessness that had broken him on Titan was the only thing that allowed him to move on back on Earth. There was no point in thinking about what might be done, because there was nothing that might be done. No hope. That didn't mean it was easy. He spent a lot of hours staring at nothing, a lot of nights not sleeping. The water got cold on him in the shower.

 

He let go first of the failure. Then he let go of the world he remembered from before Thanos. Then, last, he let go of the vanished. But he could never quite let go of Peter. That wound didn't seem to heal, it barely scabbed over. Even at his happiest – when Morgan was born, or tickling her little feet, or swimming with her in the lake on a sunny day, birds singing in the trees – he had a lingering feeling of disquiet and regret. Bitterness.

 

“Tony, he knew,” Pepper said one day, when she caught him staring at the lake but not really looking at it. The coffee next to him had gone cold and he was so still that flies were landing on him. “I know you think he didn't, but he did. He knew how much you cared about him.” Pepper could always guess when he was thinking about Peter.

 

Tony half believed it. He thought Peter must have seen it on his face, as he was going. Must have heard it in his voice as Tony said, “You're all right,” with such desperation and denial as it started to happen. But what if he didn't? At least Tony got to hold him, as he went. All that love, and he had to channel it into a single desperate, fleeting embrace.

 

The reminders were everywhere. Discarded designs for Peter's latest suit in the lab, Nacho Cheese Doritos, the cradle pendulum that Peter always fidgeted with when he was sitting on the main living room sofa. But Tony didn't get rid of them, he brought them with him to the house by the lake, he gave them places of prominence.

 

Morgan had found him staring at the framed photo of him and Peter that he kept by the sink enough times that she knew Peter by sight. She recognized him in other photos, like the album Pepper had made to commemorate the Fiji trip. (After the decimation she had leaned heavily into scrapbooking for a period. Tony liked to think that it meant she missed him too.) “Uncle Peter” he told Morgan to call him. “That's your Uncle Peter.” He showed her footage of Spider-man, and told her he was a hero.

 

Tony would have been sure to keep in touch with May, only she was gone too. He's glad she's spared the pain of losing Peter, but it would have been nice to spend some time with someone who also loved him. It would also be nice, of course, for her to not be dead. Tony poked around the apartment, holding it together, he thought, until he tasted salt in his mouth and realized more than a couple of tears had squeezed their way out. It was seeing Peter's room, seeing all of his stuff, a life interrupted, a life over almost before it began. And the memory of the first time they met, when Tony had said, “Come to Germany with me, fight for me because I need you.” And Peter had agreed, had taken a chance on him.

 

Tony bought a storage unit and put everything from May and Peter's apartment in there. He didn't know what else to do. He couldn't get rid of it. He couldn't just donate Peter's clothes like he had never existed, he couldn't just throw away the photo albums and heirlooms and little treasures. He couldn't even throw away the junk – the dirty socks, the flier with information about the field trip to MOMA Peter had been on that day, the half-finished pack of gum. He kept it all. There didn't seem to be anyone else coming up for it. Maybe they were gone too.

 

Pepper gave him a look, when he told her about the storage unit. He just shrugged helplessly at her.

 

*/*/*

 

Romanoff, Steve, and the Ant-man shattered his peace five years later like a wrecking ball through glass. He told them no – definitively no – he wouldn't even consider it. It couldn't be done, and even if it could be attempted, traveling through the quantum realm and messing with time were all kinds of dangerous. He got lucky. He had Pepper, he had Happy and Rhodey, and he was five years into a new life with his daughter – a great life. The kind of life you didn't risk for _any_ reward.

 

But hope was a burrowing insect, it was an infection. Redeem his failure, return the vanished, _get Peter back_. It's too tempting not to at least _consider_. That niggling feeling that the world isn't right without Peter still has him in its razor-sharp grip. Maybe he could have it all, be entirely happy. Maybe he really could.

 

Pulling down the photo of him and Peter for the thousandth time, looking it over, seeing Peter's smiling, innocent, _precious_ face – and remembering how much fun the two of them had together that day - clinched his decision. So he would _consider_ it. Run a few models, try out a couple of theories. But it worked. He solved time travel.

 

He went to Pepper, tried to get her to talk him out of it and remind him of all the reasons why it shouldn't be done, why the risk shouldn't be taken. He trusted Pepper's voice of reason, he trusted her to tell him if he was chasing after ghosts and his ego at the cost of everything else. But she knew him too well. She understood that now that he knew it was possible, that it was a _real possibility_ , that he wouldn't have any peace until it had been attempted.

 

He offered to forget what he had discovered. “But would you be able to rest?” she asked him. He loved her so much.

 

_There was a chance he could have Peter back. That they could all have everyone back. That Barton, who had lost his whole family, his wife and three children, could have them back._

 

*/*/*

 

Morgan was four and a half. She was wise like her mom, inquisitive and stubborn like her dad, and everyday she taught him something new about life and the world. He spent the day before his adventure through time with her, catching frogs and insects down by the lake. She put a roly-poly bug into a glass and collected some dirt and moss for its habitat.

 

“Water too,” he told her, and she carved out a little hole in the dirt and filled it with lake water. She held the cup up to her eyes and watched it crawling around. “What are you going to name it?”

 

“Ummmmm, Hot Dog.”

 

“Sure, why not?” he approved.

 

“And Macaroni And Cheese.”

 

“That's a long name.”

 

She laughed. “It's a long name. What if his name was...” and she rambled off about ten of her favorite foods, including chicken nuggets and rice and M&Ms.

 

“That would be crazy!”

 

“Crazy!”

 

“You make sure you let Hot Dog And Macaroni And Cheese go tonight before dinner, OK?” he instructed.

 

“Why?”

 

“Because he'll be happier if he's free. You want him to be happy, right?” She nodded reluctantly. “Did I ever tell you about the time _I_ was trapped in a tin can for three weeks?”

 

Her jaw dropped. “You were trapped in a can?”

 

“A big one.”

 

“How much is three weeks? Like three million hundred years?”

 

“Almost. It's daytime and then nighttime 21 times. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty twenty-one.”

 

“That's a lot.”

 

“Yeah, it is a lot. And I didn't have someone to give me water and a nice home like you've done for Hot Dog And Macaroni And Cheese. I ran out of food and water and I almost ran out of air. It was before you were born. When you were still in Mommy's tummy.”

 

“I was still in Mommy's tummy?”

 

“Uh-huh. She told me you weren't but I knew better. I was thinking about you the whole time. I wanted to get home to you because I loved you already.”

 

“Mommy played a trick on you.”

 

“Yes she did. Tricky Mommy.”

 

“Did someone lock you in the big can?”

 

“Well, it was actually a spaceship. I was up there because your old dad is pretty brave.” He poked her in the stomach and she giggled. “And I was trying to save the world. I gotta go try again tomorrow. Me and my friends might be able to bring back all those people that disappeared when the bad alien came.”

 

“Like Mommy's mommy? And Uncle Peter?”

 

“Yes. But...” He didn't want to scare her. And even though he knew he had wasted his opportunity with Peter, he still felt like it was bad luck to talk like he might not come back. But what if this was the last time he ever spoke with her? “But it's dangerous. That means I might get hurt. So I want to tell you something right now. Are you listening?”

 

“Yes, Daddy.”

 

“I love you. You are the best and most important thing to me in this whole world. Out of all the things in the world I like you the most.” He wanted to tell her that everything he did, he did for her. ...But he wasn't doing this for her. He hoped it would make a better world for her, return hope to the hopeless and broken and lost, restore innocence to the world. But that wasn't why he was doing it. “And I'm always going to love you, and I'm always going to be with you.” Tony snuck I a kiss on her forehead before he lost her attention completely to the roly-poly bug once more. She nudged it gently with a twig when he stopped moving. Then a beetle on the ground caught her eye and she started following it.

 

“So do you like bugs, then?” he asked her, surreptitiously wiping away a tear while her attention was elsewhere.

 

“Yes. Except spiders.” She gave a dramatic shudder. “Do you like bugs, Daddy?”

 

“Yes, I do. Except spiders. They're the worst.”

 


	13. Chapter 13

They pulled off the so-called Time Heist with adequate if somewhat bumpy success. Of course they were creating new timelines left and right, but that was a different problem for a different day.

 

Tony seeing his father was not part of the plan. In fact, it very nearly ruined the plan. It also almost made the whole plan worth it, because if this endeavor were to fail, at least Tony would have this one thing, this one moment that made it not for nothing. He had squandered his chance to hug the kid, but he was sure to hug his dad. “Looking back, I just remember the good stuff,” Tony told him. And it was true. It was finally true. And it was Peter, it was Morgan, it was all of it, teaching him. Like some completed circle, and Tony could finally see all of it for what it really was.

 

Tony looked at the stones, and thought, “Holy shit, we did it.” Because...he hadn't been so sure they could do it, not really. There were plans, and then there were dreams, and traveling through time to collect an assortment of magic color rocks was more of a dream then a plan.

 

They put the stones into the gauntlet he had designed, and they were one step closer. They had lost Romanoff – he had known they would lose something and he really wished it hadn't been her. He felt like, maybe more than any of them, she had something good left to give to the world, and now she would never be able to. But she had given enough already – all of this was because of her. Bruce was the most outwardly upset, but Steve was looking like he was reconsidering the entire undertaking, that maybe what they had paid for it was already too much. That maybe Tony had been right, that day on his porch, when he had warned them against it. Thor was even more of a mess than he had been this entire time, and Barton was feeling the trade like it was a wish made on a monkey's paw.

 

He should have sensed something was off with Nebula because she wasn't looking at him the way she usually looked at him, but to be fair, the difference between when she was emoting and when she wasn't was barely detectable with the naked eye. Still, he should have noticed, that was on him. But they were all too focused on losing Romanoff, and then on the gauntlet, to notice much of anything. He was so close to seeing Peter again he could almost hear the kid butchering “The Piña Colada Song” and he wasn't thinking about much else.

 

Bruce was the one to wield the stones and do the snap. It was anything but easy to get to this point and there were plenty of unexpected complications, but still, Tony was thinking it should have been harder, and then it was. He barely has time to acknowledge that it worked, that somewhere in this universe Peter must be back, before they're all fighting for their lives to get out of the death trap that the Avengers compound has become thanks to...thanks to he doesn't know what, until he gets out and sees a spaceship to dwarf all spaceships, and Thanos himself, sitting pretty as can be.

 

“We messed with time. It tends to mess back,” he tells Cap. It messed back in the worst way it could have – Thanos, on Earth, on his Earth where his daughter lives, and a completed infinity gauntlet almost within his reach. Not only did he have to dance with this giant California Raisin once more, but they were one wrong move away from going through Thanos' snap all over again.

 

 _This is exactly what I was afraid of_. _Time travel, we were so fucking arrogant._ But Peter is alive again and they haven't lost yet, so right now, he'll take it. At least he _thinks_ Peter is alive again. He won't really believe it until he sees it with his own eyes. _Come on, Doc, Quill. Bring my boy back to me._

 

Even without the stones, without a single one, Thanos is the most powerful entity they've ever fought. It's Tony, Thor, and Cap, giving it their all, and he's playing with them, he's having the time of his life. And he's changed his mind, too. If he gets the gauntlet he's not going to snap half of life out of existence, he's coming for all of them, every last stubborn one.

 

It's a powerful motivator.

 

And as bleak as it looked, Thanos throwing them around like they're the toy versions of themselves, the compound reduced to smoking rubble around them, and Bruce, Barton, Scott, and the others MIA – it's worse yet when Thanos' “children” – the ones that had made quick business of Tony, Strange, and Peter on the streets of New York five years ago – and a very familiar-looking army of Chitauri and God knows what else – come pouring out of Thanos' ship looking ready for a fight. Cap, the only one standing at the moment is, of course, ready to take them on all by himself, but that's when Strange finally gets his shit together and arrives in grandiose fashion with a Rolodex's worth of hero-types behind him.

 

And Peter's with them. They did it. They really did it.

 

Strange must have opened a portal from Titan. Tony's not quite with it yet while it's all happening (he's probably concussed, hopefully not bleeding internally, he thinks, as he realizes the fight is only starting), but it takes everyone so long to arrive that he's on his feet before it's all over. There's no time for an emotional reunion – Thanos is surprised, dismayed, but still confident - but Tony's finally ready for that big emotional moment he's been denying the kid for years.

 

Tony is part of the aerial assault – Cap's bird friend is with him, Quill, Rhodey, even Pepper is there. (Happy is probably at the house babysitting. He's a godfather of sorts, he'll take good care of Morgan no matter what happens.) And also a...woman riding a Pegasus? That's new. Peter's on the ground, on the front line. Tony plans to keep an eye on him – he is NOT losing that kid again - but that doesn't exactly work out, because the enemy is everywhere and it doesn't get tired. After the two sides merge, Tony looks around in a frenzy and can't find Peter, then convinces himself that Peter's probably fine, probably just off introducing himself to everyone. Tony gets slapped like a little bitch, like a flicked pebble, into something very, very hard. He's bracing himself for the beast to attack again when suddenly it can't move its arms. _Peter!_ He's still got some web left, thank God. It gets yanked back and Scott, who's back now and as big as a skyscraper, squishes Tony's attacker under his heel like a cigarette butt. And then Peter comes leaping over from behind Scott's giant ankle. _He was keeping an eye on_ me, Tony realizes with a sweet ache.

 

It seems like Peter has been looking for the first opportunity to approach him, and now that Tony is on the ground he finally can. He's as solicitous as the last time he had helped him back up to his feet, which for Peter was probably less than an hour ago.

 

The kid is rambling on, he doesn't know what he's talking about. He has no idea what Tony has been through the past five years. He wouldn't be joking around this much, making this light of it, if he knew what Tony had been through. But that's also just who he is, this ball of ridiculous, babbling energy, and Tony loves him.

 

Peter's right there in front of him, but Tony still can't quite believe it. He's just staring at him, in stubborn disbelief and momentary bliss and _love_. There's a part of him that thinks he's still lying on the ground, concussed, and this is delirium. He's dying, and his mind is telling him a happy story. A happy dream to send him off. If so, it'll do.

 

Tony walks towards him - and there's an intensity to his movement, like he's walking him back into a wall the way an opponent or a lover would. Which is probably why Peter actually takes a step backwards, because at first he has no idea what's happening. The intensity is partly the suit, but not entirely the suit, it's partly just him, Tony, over-eager. “What are you doing?” Peter has to ask, though by then he knows, he's just too skeptical to believe it.

 

Tony wraps his arms around the kid. And the hug is everything it could be, everything it should have been five years ago, and long before that. The kid was family, and he was back. He despaired for five years, he invented time travel, he chased a blue stone across decades, and it was (mostly) all for this. Peter's so shocked that it's a full three seconds or more before Tony feels the pressure of his arms around him, reciprocating. The iron suits are too thick – he can't quite feel him the way he longs too. It's frustrating. He tries to hold him tighter and metal bounces off of metal.

 

He hears Peter sigh as he relaxes into the hug, and after Tony blinks back tears of joy, he sighs too. There haven't been many occasions in Tony's life when he has cried from happiness. He tries again to hold Peter tighter and it doesn't work but it's still the hug of a lifetime.

 

It's a brief moment of rightness with the world. Tony is swimming in love. His love for the kid, the kid's love for him. The power of all of it. The _goodness_ of this.

 

“This is nice,” Peter says, still in shock. It shows he's feeling the exact same thing.

 

The moment is brief compared to what Tony wants, but they take longer than they should with it. The Avengers and company are holding their own, but they're in danger. Morgan might even be in danger if this keeps going south. The whole universe.

 

Tony's eyes were briefly closed, maybe Peter's were or are too. Is anyone watching? Is anyone wondering about them? Asking the same questions that Strange and Nebula and Pepper felt compelled to ask?

 

Eventually they have to pull away, but it's not their choice. It's an alien something or the other that foolishly thinks it's a match for them. Tony feels like he can take on anything right now.

 

*/*/*

 

Killing Thanos isn't working out (not even for Carol Danvers), so once the gauntlet reappears from where it had been buried in the rubble, their next best option is to get the stones back to where they came from. The only other quantum tunnel is in Scott's van, which gets blown to smithereens. (It's a dark day for quantum tunnels.) So it's back to plan A again, only it's starting to look like there's only way to do that, and it's going to be Tony's job. He knows it'll be the death of him, and he cares more than he wishes he did. He wishes he could be as selfless as Cap, as noble as Thor, as clear-sighted as Romanoff, as caring as Bruce, as determined as Barton, and all with Peter's heart. But no, he rages inside. He just got Peter back. He's only been married for five years. His daughter is only four years old. _It's not fair._ Will she even remember him? _Really_ remember him?

 

But it should be him. It was always going to be him, and he sees that in Strange's face as the time wizard lifts a single finger. 1 in 14 million. This is it.

 

The pain is like nothing he has ever experienced. But for a second he's a god. He wields all six stones. It takes every last ounce of strength he's got to manage the snap, but it's worth it to watch this army from hell disappearing in front of his eyes. He was dying, but he didn't fail this time. Morgan was safe. Pepper had survived the battle. And Peter was back.

 

He sits down, and he can feel the life draining out of him. Is this what it felt like for Peter, when he was turning to dust on Titan? He's not sure how much longer he's going to last – he's afraid he won't still be here by the time everyone who is running across the battlefield towards him arrives. Rhodey is first, and they've been friends for so long that there's nothing that needs saying, but Tony's so glad he had one last moment with him. Rhodey was always with him, always by his side. And he still is.

 

Peter's next. Rhodey had been nearby and could fly, but Peter has to cross half the field to get back to him and he does it at a break-neck speed, berserk. He drops down in front of Tony and the look of despair and disbelief on his face is all too familiar. They've been through this before, and Tony can at least be glad he's the one leaving this time.

 

Rhodey backs off a little reluctantly, but he understands that he and Peter need this moment more than he and Rhodey do. Rhodey's movements were slow and labored and sorrowful; Peter is frantic. He doesn't care who he knocks out of the way to get to Tony and he doesn't care who sees how much he loves him. He's breathless and crying. He took a real beating in the battle and Tony is worried about him – blood coming out of his nose and he's pale. Not quite as bad as when Tony found him in the dumpster but Tony still doesn't like it.

 

 _Take it easy, you're gonna have an aneurysm_ , Tony wants to say. But he's not really saying much. He's thinking words, he's thinking about the movement of his mouth, but he knows nothing is coming out. The connection between his brain and his body is tenuous, and only growing worse. In fact, he can barely direct his eyes. The physical world around him is becoming very distant, like he's under water, deep under.

 

“Mr. Stark? Can you hear me? _It's Peter_.” There's a hint of their special relationship in his tone. As if he had only needed to say “It's _me_.”

 

 _Peter..._ Yes. Tony fights the water, manages to look at him. The kid has practically crawled into his lap. Peter doesn't know what to do or say, he's touching Tony's chest all over and struggling to breathe, gasping and crying. _I love you, kid._ He has to direct all the things he wishes he could say into his eyes and pray that the kid could read them. He doesn't know what they had together, how to label it or what to make of it, but he knows he loves him and that he would have found a way to keep him somehow. To keep him in his life. _Know that, Peter. Know that. Look after Pepper. Look after Morgan – you don't know her yet but she's great. And look after Earth, because it needs it. And know that there was something here, there always was._

 

How did Tony ever manage to fall in... _whatever_ with this well-mannered, loyal-to-the-death little angel? He was goddamned lucky.

 

He left a recording for Morgan. A few pearls of wisdom, and something for her to remember him by. All he could leave for Peter that wouldn't be seen by anyone else was a letter. He had held back while writing it, held back like he always did, and Tony is just now realizing how terrifically inadequate it was. Just like everything he had tried to do for the kid. Maybe, once Peter gets EDITH, he'll at least be able to appreciate how much Tony trusted him.

 

Rhodey's there in the background, but the battlefield is quiet now and no one else is close by. It really feels like it's just the two of them in that moment, him and Peter. Reunited and then rent again.

 

“We won, and you did it, sir. You did it.” Peter's trying to be strong for him, but unlike Rhodey, and Pepper who has just arrived, he can't accept what's happening. They had prepared themselves for this, but Peter hadn't, and he's cracking. The more he tries to say, the more he breaks down. He's the only one of them who looks like he's still praying for it to somehow be undone, the only one still trying to figure out if there's some other way.

 

Pepper has to pull Peter away, and he fights her at first. She probably gave him more time than she wanted to but he's greedy and still wants more. He finally yields to her, and she's magnanimous and gentle, even though deep down she must know that Tony has given a piece of his heart to Peter, a piece he has taken from her share. His heart just isn't big enough to love them both as much as they deserve. But failure is typical of Tony's heart...

 

“I'm sorry, Tony...” _Tony_. Tony should have made Peter call him “Tony” all along because it feels fucking great to hear it, even in that wretched, forlorn tone. There's such a cruel tease there of what might have been, what their relationship might have evolved into, might have endured to become. But also of what it was, underneath all the pretenses. Peter still has his hands on Tony's chest, frantically touching him, trying to get every last second out of it. Trying desperately to recapture the magic of their hug while Tony fades underneath his fingertips.

 

 _Don't be sorry, kid. Stop saying you're sorry. You've got nothing to be sorry for._ Tony wants to yell at him.

 

Peter backs up into Rhodey, who tries to hold him but he's inconsolable. Tony needs Pepper there, but he's not easy with Peter getting father away. He needs them both here with him, in front of his eyes. But maybe this is for the best. It's getting harder to concentrate. He has to give Pepper everything he has left.

 

She knows just what to say to him: “We're gonna be OK. You can rest now.” He needed her permission. Now he has has it. He can go.

 

The last thing he feels is Pepper's hand on the side of his face, and the last thing he hears is Peter's ragged breathing and muffled sobs.

 


	14. Chapter 14

Peter remembered watching the 2012 attack on New York on the news. Terrified, but comforted by the idea of the Avengers. He remembered Iron Man – such a badass. Saving the world, looking cool doing it. He never would have guessed then that Tony frickin' Stark would ever even know who he was, let alone that there would be a letter waiting for him after Tony's death.

 

It was all a blur. A trip across planets through a portal, a massive battle for the very fate of the universe, and now Tony was dead, and five years had gone by in the literal blink of Peter's eye.

 

It was _2023_. Someone else was living in their apartment. He and May were in a hotel.

 

It was all a blur. He was in and out of numbness.

 

Happy delivered the letter in person, and the two of them shared a hug that Happy himself uncharacteristically initiated. Happy was weepy but Peter was all cried out for the moment. His eyes and jaw were sore, the skin under his nose raw, his head throbbed.

 

“There weren't a lot of these,” Happy said, indicating the letter with a gesture and giving Peter a meaningful look.

 

“Yeah, he was superstitious about that kind of thing.”

 

“That's not what I mean. I'm saying you meant a lot to him.”

 

Did Happy notice Peter was holding the letter so tightly his knuckles were going white?

 

Happy has been his intermediary with Pepper. Peter doesn't want to bother her – she just lost her husband. ...And she scared him on a good day. Happy gave them all the information they needed to access the storage unit where Tony had stashed their stuff. May cried, overwhelmed - she thought it was all in some landfill somewhere. Peter reeled a little, with the magnitude of the gesture. Tony must have thought he was dead for good, but he still kept everything. “It's a Stark property, so no hurry,” Happy told him. “The unit's yours for as long as you want it. Pepper wanted me to make sure you knew that.” He also gave them several thousand dollars in cash in a fancy briefcase. They needed it – May's estate had been liquidated and dispersed – but May and Peter tried to refuse it. “Don't bother, I'm not taking it back with me,” Happy said, closing his fist against their attempts to put the handle back into his hand. “Tony told Pepper to take care of you if he didn't come back. He knew what you would be up against.”

 

Peter sat down, shut his eyes, and sighed. How could someone who had had so many things to worry about have taken the time to worry about _him_?

 

“I'll see you at the service.”

 

He didn't open the letter while Happy was there. He waited for Aunt May to leave too, though after what they had just been through, she wasn't too keen on giving him space. And she didn't want to leave him because she knew he was...grief-stricken. Not just grieving, but _stricken_. But she had apartment shopping that needed doing and he encouraged her to go.

 

Peter stared at the letter. It was in an ordinary sealed envelope, and he recognized Tony's handwriting on the back. “The Kid” it said; it was _almost_ enough to make Peter smile. But when he was alone, when May was not looking, he didn't smile very much.

 

He stared at the letter while he ate a sandwich. He took a shower. He stared at the letter some more after. He took a break from flipping through the TV channels – there aren't any good sports anymore, all of his favorite shows were canceled because half the cast and crew and writers and producers disappeared, so there's nothing he's excited to catch up on – to stare at the letter. And then he took a break from staring at the letter to answer a neurotic phone call from May and promise her that he was just fine.

 

Only he wasn't really fine.

 

There were plenty of reasons to wait to read it. He had a whole lifetime ahead of him and this would be the last time Tony ever spoke to him. The last thing Peter ever received from him. His last moment with him that wouldn't just be in Peter's head.

 

But the service was on Saturday, and it made sense to read it first. Part of that was selfish. He was going to be watching Ms. Potts and their little girl receive all the condolences, and the letter would be his armor, his reminder that he wasn't just another polite mourner, another _fan_ or colleague – he and Tony had had something special.

 

There also might be instructions in there, and if there were, Peter meant to follow them.

 

After more procrastination – he made a smoothie, watched some more TV – he finally took the letter into his room, laid down on his bed, and opened it up.

 

It was a lot shorter than he wanted it to be. A single handwritten page in Tony's unrushed, small script. Tony had addressed it to “Peter”, and that was when Peter started preparing himself for something that was going to gut him, because it seemed like Tony Stark had finally decided to be serious.

 

> _Peter,_
> 
>  
> 
> _I don't know if this thing we're going to try will work. If you're reading this, I guess that means it did, but it got me killed. Or maybe my brain turned to jelly, or I got stuck in the fourteenth century with a talking raccoon and a bionic smurf – there are_ _a lot_ _of things that might go wrong. Point is, I'm not there, you are. I'm sure if that's true, then I went out feeling like it was all worth it – not that I won't be pissed when the moment comes, because I've got a lot of life left to live – with my wife and daughter, and making up for the five years I missed out on with you. To lose you just when I got you back again – how is that for an indifferent universe? One of my biggest regrets about dying will be that we won't be making more memories together, because the ones I've got, the ones that I have been replaying over and over again these past five years while I've missed you like hell, are worth a lot. And I really felt like we were only just getting started._
> 
>  
> 
> _That's right, I have a daughter now. A lot can happen in five years. I think you'll see most of it was bad, but not all of it, not her. I'm sure someone already told you about her, but I'm sorrier than you'll ever know that I wasn't the one who got to introduce you to her. Her name is Morgan and she is the light of the world – a torch she took from you. It's her world now, and yours. It needs you. So take care of her for me and take care it, but don't you dare get yourself killed doing it like I did. Not after all the trouble I went to to bring you back._
> 
>  
> 
> _You really did save the universe. I'm not sure I would have done this if it weren't for you. Don't let it go to your head._
> 
>  
> 
> _Infinity stones, gods and myths, aliens that are millions of years old. There's a lot out there, a lot that I know. But I still don't know what's coming next. But I'll be watching over my wife and daughter. And you can be sure I'll be watching over you too. So don't do anything I wouldn't do. And don't do anything I would do either._
> 
>  
> 
> _I love you, kid._
> 
> _Mr. Stark_

 

> _P.S. Don't go getting a new mentor too fast._

 

He had signed it “Mr. Stark.” Of course, at that point, Peter could barely read it through his tears. He had waited to be alone with the letter because he had wondered – hoped? - that it might be too personal, too private, too _suggestive_ to let anyone else get a look at it. Tony had sealed it, hadn't he? But now he wished May was here, holding him while he cried.

 

 _Tony_...

 

*/*/*

 

It was a good letter. But it would always be a disappointment to Peter - not fairly, but selfishly. Vanity and hurt and jealousy. Because Peter knew what he had wanted it to say. He had wanted Tony to tell him that he was the person he cared about most in the world. That Peter was the person he would miss the most. That life without Peter had been empty and meaningless. Peter knew that Tony had loved him. He had felt it, seen it, experienced it through action – he knew it to be so. He wanted something else from the letter, something a little bit more.

 

Those were ridiculous desires. He hadn't _expected_ the letter to say anything like that. He knew he couldn't compare himself to Ms. Potts or Tony's daughter. He was something else – important, but less important. Even Peter himself couldn't have said those things to Tony – he loved May too much to feel them, let alone say them.

 

But he had convinced himself that maybe... Maybe there would be some hint that he was more important to him than Tony had ever allowed him to believe. That their relationship was more...destabilizing to Tony's life.

 

But what _was_ in the letter was enough. Peter read it over and over again. He made a bunch of copies and put them in different places, so that no matter what happened, he would still have one left. By the time Saturday came he had it memorized. _I love you, kid._

 

*/*/*

 

First, there was a big service at Madison Square Garden. All the screens in Times Square projected the international broadcast of it. Millions were watching all over the world. Peter didn't go because he didn't want to share Tony with the world. The world was crying and they were all going to think he was just one more sad citizen, a fan, instead of someone who _really_ knew him and really loved him. But partway through, when Peter had it on the TV in the background while he tried and failed to read, Pepper called him and said his saved seat in the front row was still empty and that she wanted him there. So he slipped on his webslingers and his suit and hustled his way across town. He attended as Spider-man, because the world ought to know how much Spider-man owed Iron Man.

 

There was a more intimate ceremony afterwards at their house. It was a lovely cabin by the lake, a fantastic property – private, buried in nature. But Peter hated it, because he used to be over at Tony's house all the time – he _knew_ Tony's house, he was encouraged to raid the fridge at will - but he had never seen this place before. Tony had lived five years in this house and Peter had never even seen it before. It made him feel so isolated from him, so estranged.

 

But what the house made him feel was nothing compared to what Tony's daughter did. This new person - this most important person – existed, and Peter didn't know her. Tony's last five years were consumed with this creature, and she was a stranger to him. Perhaps worse, _he_ was a stranger to _her_. She had dark hair, like Tony. And his eyes, too – though maybe that was just fanciful. Maybe that was just what Peter wanted to see. He didn't think she looked all that much like Pepper, until he saw them side-by-side. There's was something similar about the sets to their mouths, the way their eyebrows moved, their distribution of freckles. When she lost all her cherubic baby fat, she would probably resemble her mother more.

 

Peter was grateful Tony had had this life. That if he had to die, that this had come before it: a child, like he had wanted so much, no matter how much it terrified him; Pepper; and peace in his time – for a few years, anyway. But it was just so unfair. That he had to die at all. That Peter had missed out on so much with him.

 

The Avengers were all there. And others that Peter hadn't even known about, had barely even had the chance to notice in the big battle against Thanos and his army. It was a pleasure to meet them (or properly meet them), despite the occasion. Famous figures like Thor and the Hulk, former opponents from Germany like Captain America and the Falcon, familiar faces from Titan like Doctor Strange and the pretty bug lady with the antennae. (Her name was Mantis, he would try really hard to remember that this time.) He didn't have a chance to meet everyone – he wasn't much in the mood for talking. They all came to honor Tony and send him off. They set the piece of tech that had saved his life back when he first built the rudimentary origins of his Iron Man suit adrift on the lake on a bed of flowers and Peter tried to stand tall and be as decorous as all the tough, impressive figures around him, but it was a struggle. At one point his hand was shaking so much that May had to take it and hold it still for him.

 

They were all sad, but peaceful. Was Peter the only one wondering why there wasn't someone among these big brains and intergalactic big-time heroes that couldn't figure out how to fix this? Tony had brought him back. And Peter had failed him. And now Tony was dead. Why does his have to be the death that sticks?

 

It wasn't right. Why were they all acting like it was right?

 

May noticed him looking around, noticed his distress, and his anger. She squeezed his hand tighter.

 

The gloomy blue woman who had fought with them against Thanos on Titan found him after the crowd had begun to break up, some of the mourners going their own way, some sticking around to exchange condolences. Peter was still learning about all that had happened in the five years he had missed, but he knew Tony had made it off Titan with this alien in Peter Quill's damaged ship – and had only survived, after 23 days, thanks to the glowy woman named Carol.

 

“Hi, I'm Peter Parker,” he said, when he realized she wanted to talk to him. “We fought Thanos together on another planet.”

 

Her eyes were all black, and she didn't move her face very much but he thought she was giving him the same look everyone gave him, the one that told him that they thought he was a little weird. “I know who you are,” she said. After a long pause, she added, as if she was only just remembering that it ought to be said: “I'm Nebula.”

 

“That's a cool name.”

 

It was quickly becoming awkward, because she didn't say anything else even though she had obviously sought him out. “You're sad,” she finally observed.

 

Well, that was an understatement. He was fucking broken. “...Yes. I was-He and I were-we were-” Peter felt the welling of water in his eyes again. “We-”

 

“Were family. Yes, I know. I was with him, after my father...did what he did. He talked about you. A lot.” She finished with a complaint: “Too much.”

 

Peter scratched his head, tried to sniffle quietly. “He did?”

 

“He was...sad. Like you.”

 

Peter inhaled deeply, and nodded. He tried to thank her, but it came out a little choked. She nodded, understanding, and then, her duty done, escaped as quickly as she could.

 

Doctor Strange caught his eye and gave Peter a feeling nod, like he understood somehow exactly what had been taken from him. Peter found it oddly bracing.

 

Most of the others who knew Tony well found him and made similar comments to what Happy had said the day he gave Peter the letter – about how much Tony had cared about him, and how much Tony had missed him. Maybe it was all just politeness, but maybe it really had made an impression on them. Peter felt like he was getting preferential treatment as a mourner, like they were all saying, “I'm sorry for _your_ loss” the same way they were saying it to Pepper.

 

Especially Rhodey, who pulled him aside down by the water after the gathering had thinned and said, “I never saw Tony take a shine to anyone the way he did to you, kid. You changed his life, the way he looked at himself and the whole Iron Man thing. Really.”

 

“Thanks. Uh, Mr. Rhodey, sir. Uh, Mr. Rhodes, I mean.”

 

“'Sir' is fine,” he joked, giving Peter a pat on the back.

 

“It was nothing compared to how he changed my life.”

 

“Yeah. I know all about that. He did the same for me.” He laughed: “Or he ruined it. I'm still not sure which.” His face sobered again after they both shared an emotional chuckle. “I just wanted to say: I saw it in his eyes as he was...going. That moment you two had at the end. He really cared about you.”

 

Peter didn't do a very good job of returning the favor – he stumbled over a tearful acknowledgment of Tony and Rhodey's longstanding friendship and Rhodey's loyalty. “What do you think he would want us to do now?” Peter asked him.

 

“Probably build him a really big statue.”

 

May was helping Pepper in the kitchen, and Peter joined them. She handed him a towel, and he helped dry cups and forks. That was when he noticed the photo on the shelf by the sink: him and Tony, the Stark Internship. “He kept this here?” Peter asked Pepper, amazed and moved.

 

“It was the only thing on this shelf when he first put it here. But the longer you live in a house, the more the shelves fill up.” She pulled it down and handed it to him. “He thought about you all the time. He didn't stop thinking about you ever.” Even May didn't miss the tiny inflection of resentment; she tactfully absented herself, wandering over towards Morgan, and asking her about the drawing she was doing. Pepper glanced at May, waiting until she was out of earshot. “I'll admit, I wanted him to. To stop. He always held one small part of himself back from this life. Because he couldn't be 100% happy without you.”

 

Peter lifted his eyes up from the photo and stared at Pepper. She pursed her lips, though there was tenderness in her expression too, and turned back to the sink.

 

“You should keep that,” she said.

 

This drew Morgan's attention, who came bounding over. She tried to snatch the framed photo out of his hand. “No, that's my daddy's! You can't have that.” Peter didn't let go at first, and she tugged and tugged, no match for his strength or spidery stickiness. He finally, reluctantly, let her have it, and she ran off with it upstairs.

 

“I'll get it back from her later,” Pepper said, sighing.

 

“No, it's OK. I've already got a copy of the photo. If she wants it, let her keep it.”

 

“She probably thinks it was one of his most valued possessions, since he spent so much time looking at it.”

 

Peter was still staring at the stairs, where Morgan had disappeared. “I don't think she likes me,” he confessed to Pepper. He had tried to approach the little girl earlier. To shake her hand, maybe ask her how old she was or about her favorite color. She had avoided him, though he had caught her watching him once or twice.

 

Pepper smiled sadly. “All she knows is that her dad was sad about her Uncle Peter dying. Then her dad goes off to fix it. Uncle Peter comes back, but her dad doesn't. It's a pretty bum trade, from her point of view.”

 

“I think it's a bum trade too.”

 

“Tony wouldn't have thought so, and he wouldn't want you thinking so either. She'll understand one day. What really happened. What he really did and all the people it saved. But she's not entirely wrong. He never said so, but, Peter, I don't think Tony would have left this house, except to save you. He had hung up the suit, made peace with with having lost the battle. But he hadn't made peace with losing you.” That's what the letter had said. Peter hadn't believed it – but maybe it really _was_ true.

 

“'Uncle Peter'?” Peter finally asked, after a long, ponderous silence. _Just like Tony had promised._

 

“After he lost you, it became clear to him: you were family.” She added, with meaning: “You _are_ family, Peter.”

 

 


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This does have spoilers for Spider-man: Far From Home, though I don't think it would ruin the movie for anyone who hasn't seen it yet. It doesn't follow that movie closely, the way I did with Infinity War and Endgame - it's sort of looking back after all of that has happened. 
> 
> Peter's birthday is in August, and he should have been about to turn 17 in Infinity War. Far From Home takes place, for Peter, eight months later, and it's said that he's still 16. He might have blipped right over August, but the time itself went by, so Far From Home makes an error. I'm keeping the age I've given him in the story because it's accurate. 
> 
> I'm not ignoring the mid-credits scene, but I'm treating it as if the conflict it created was resolved in such a way that things mainly went back to the status quo.

Peter knew who he was. But now, without Tony? He's not so sure anymore.

 

So much of who he wanted to be was to impress Tony - to get his attention, to put them side-by-side as partners and teammates. To just _be_ with him – as mentor and mentee, as friends, as whatever – _it didn't matter_. And Peter had begun to picture himself at Stark Industries working alongside Tony and Pepper. Tony had said, “Any job you want, it's yours when you want it.” Peter had been looking forward to that future together. It had been his whole plan. It had been the trajectory of his life. Now what?

 

Life had lost most of its flavor. Very little seemed to feel like it mattered anymore.

 

And he just... _really_ missed him. His eyes hadn't stopped being red since the day it happened, from crying and sleeplessness and nightmares. The world didn't really make sense anymore without Tony Stark. It was a scary place. Lonely too. Colorless.

 

And all that hero stuff? He had well and truly seen the dark side of it now. He had gone from bothering Happy daily about the next mission to ignoring Nick Fury's calls. But if he couldn't save Tony, then he wasn't the guy, was he? The next Iron Man shouldn't be the person who failed to save the first one. And there was never going to be a next Iron Man – not really. The world might need someone to step up, but that someone would never be equal to Tony. Peter felt that despair like a pin in his heart. The heart beat on, but only painfully.

 

Peter and Ned navigated their way together around what the world had become after what Thanos had done to it. It was a mess. It needed Tony Stark, not Peter Parker. Ned tried to encourage him, to get him back into the suit and out on the streets. But he could sense that Peter wasn't the same person anymore after losing Tony – he wasn't the same kind of _hero_ , and the whole world had lost what innocence it had left after New York in 2012, even if the return of the vanished and the heroic sacrifice of Iron Man had given a little of it back. Ned could see that Peter wasn't jut sad about losing someone he had loved and someone he would miss (someone who, after all, had reached 50, had lived a full life full of meaning and died the same way), but was angry about it, and _ravaged_ by it, and lost, and confused. And Peter couldn't turn a corner without seeing something that reminded him of it. Tony was everywhere.

 

There were distractions along the way, like MJ. He liked her, she even knew that he was Spider-man (well...for a time, _everyone_ knew), and they were something close to happy for a little while. She was there when he needed someone there, to distract him, to remind him about all the other parts of life and living. But it didn't fill the void, the gaping hole inside of him. As much as he tried. It was only ever fleeting.

 

He saw in May's sympathetic, tiptoeing looks that she thought he just needed time. But she didn't understand. She didn't understand that Peter was...was what? _In love with him_? Maybe not quite that, but something very like it. Or maybe just that. Maybe it wasn't as complicated or confusing as he had always thought, maybe it was really simple, just a little unconventional. Maybe it just didn't look like what it usually looked like. It had been something so... _underneath_ , so subconscious for so long, and just as Peter had been starting to discover what he really felt and really wanted, he had lost him.

 

Tony Stark had been the star in his little solar system, and the star had burned out. And now Peter was just a stray chunk of rock.

 

There was footage of Iron Man and footage of Tony Stark all over the internet, and Peter devoted time – too much time, daily time - to watching it. Tony's old press conferences from the early 2000s were amusing enough to make Peter laugh out loud. But his favorites were the videos he had taken himself on his phone – the two of them hanging out in Tony's lab, Christmas in Fiji, the fake Stark Internship video that they had made for May on the way back from Germany. His heart hurt, but his face hurt from smiling.

 

Thor and Carol had left the planet. Natasha Romanoff, Vision, and Tony were dead. Captain America was living out what remained of his life in an alternate timeline. And people – like Nick Fury – were starting to turn to Peter. He rose to the occasion.

 

But not at first.

 

At first he wanted to put the webs away, because all that crime-fighting, alien-fighting, hero stuff just reminded him of Tony, and his own unworthiness. And after losing him, he just needed a break. He needed to find a way to care about life again. And he was just a highschooler, after all. He wanted to make sure he had the chance to be _Peter_ , and not just the suit. And even if he had been willing to throw himself all into it, that didn't mean he was ready. Was he ready to be responsible for the whole world? Hell no.

 

But eventually, he had to. Happy had said, “I don't think Tony would have done what he did if he didn't know you were going to be here after he was gone.” And Peter felt, instinctively, that it was true. He saw it in the way that Tony seemed to have chosen him. _Tony_ had thought he was ready. _Tony_ was the one who had told Fury to call on him. Tony had left him E.D.I.T.H., and a note – there had been another communication from him after the letter after all – a mantle. Tony had left him the fight. Peter had tried to pass it off, at first. The letter, the treasured letter Tony left him had said: _Don't go getting a new mentor too fast._ But Peter was so crushed, so wrung, so tired: he just wanted someone to tell him what to do. He just wanted it to be someone else's job. So he had turned to Quentin Beck, and he had tried to send Doctor Strange into the ring, and Rhodey and all the others. But Tony had wanted it to be him, and that anointing, and having failed it at first, is what finally stirred him back to action.

 

It was a big commission, filling Iron Man's shoes. He knew he never could, but he found his own way to be there for the little guy, the neighborhood, the Starks, the Earth.

 

And he found a way to surround himself with things that reminded him of Tony.

 


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, everyone, for reading, and for your wonderful comments! I'm so grateful for your kind reception and your encouragement. 
> 
> I wanted to warn you all that the story sort of switches gears at this point. This story is absolutely first and foremost a Tony/Peter story and the remainder continues to explore Peter's feelings towards Tony and deal with his grief, but there's going to be a considerable jump into the future and the final five chapters will also sketch out a romance between Peter and Morgan Stark. 
> 
> I'm a very self-indulgent writer, and I pretty much always tell the story I want to read, not necessarily the one everyone else wants to. I'm fully aware this might not interest most of you and I totally understand, so I wanted to warn you and give you the chance to end your readership at the last chapter (Chapter 15) if you want to. It's a sort of optional ending – choose your own adventure. But I do very much see the story I am going to tell with Peter and Morgan as a continuation of what has already been published, and it's made explicitly clear that Peter has trouble figuring out where his feelings for Tony end and his feelings for Morgan begin. There's also a sense of things coming full circle and lots of meaningful parallels. Peter ending up with Tony's daughter is where the idea of things being wrapped up in a “neat little bow” comes in. It's a little too perfect, but a special kind of satisfying.

“Deja vu!” Peter laughed, recovering from his surprise as he lowered his wrist. He had been about to shoot off enough web to pin the arriving figure against the brick facade of the Italian restaurant to his left, an instinctive reaction, but then he recognized the blue and silver iron suit, glinting in the sun. “Do you remember when I-” Peter cut himself off; Pepper hadn't said a word. “Pepper...?” he asked, slowly raising his wrist again. He hadn't often seen her using the suit, but he knew it was still functional after all these years and that she wasn't afraid to put it on when needed. Peter's latest suit was made with Tony's technology and connected to Tony's OS, the shared network, and the Stark Industries satellites, so he knew she could hear him, even over the blaring bank alarm and the sirens in the distance. “ _Pepper_?” he repeated, in a warning tone.

 

He wasn't taking any chances; Peter webbed her against the wall when she still didn't answer him. She tried to dodge it, without attacking him, and she managed to slice her way out of it twice, but then he finally got her pinned in a way that left her temporarily helpless. He heard a feminine groan through the communicator – they were definitely connected over the network and it definitely wasn't Pepper.

 

He shot her a couple of looks while he was finishing up with the armed robbery that had him out and about in the first place. She was struggling, and was probably only two or three minutes away from working her way out of it when he doubled up the web and she could no longer move. He left the robbers dangling from a streetlight for the arriving police and swung his way over to Pepper's suit. He pulled off the helmet and...

 

He should guessed. “ _Morgan_?”

 

“Hey!” She gave him both a sheepish smile and a warm greeting, somehow both at the same time.

 

“What the hell are you doing?”

 

“I saw the robbery on the news. I wanted to help.” She wanted to be an Avenger just like her dad; she had said it more than once.

 

He shook his head at her, too furious to speak. “Does your mom know you're here?”

 

She repeated what he had said in a mocking tone.

 

Peter slammed his hand against the brick wall beside her head to show her that he was serious and her teasing expression faltered. “Come on, it's not that dangerous,” she argued. “I could waltz my way through a firing squad in this suit and I wouldn't even have a bruise.” She pointed over at the robbers. “Those guys couldn't hurt me.”

 

“You never know when what is going on is more complicated than it seems. One time I thought I was stopping a run-of-the-mill crime and the guy was armed with alien tech. I would have drowned that night if your father hadn't been there to save me.”

 

“Well that was the other point that I was about make: you were here. I knew that before I came.”

 

He groaned in frustration. “You're only 17! You're a kid.”

 

“Weren't you _14_ when you started going this stuff?” She lifted her brows at him smugly.

 

“That was totally different.”

 

“How was it different?”

 

“It just was.”

 

“Uh huh,” she replied. Her big brown eyes regarding him with skeptical affection quickly melted his anger. “Maybe I just wanted to see you,” she suggested. “You haven't been by in forever.”

 

“I was just there for your birthday dinner.”

 

“That was four months ago!”

 

“Wow. Was it really?” It was scary how fast time went by when you got older. Peter could have sworn he had just been over at the house to see them, and he never would have let four months go by without seeing her if he had been more aware. _Is that why I've been so lonely?_ He had been feeling weird and disconnected, thinking a lot about Tony and spending a lot of nights home alone.

 

“You don't need an excuse to come by, you know?” she reminded him, as if she could read his thoughts.

 

“No, I know that,” he replied. But maybe he had forgotten it. For a long time it had been awkward with Pepper – he wanted to be supportive, but was afraid she didn't want him around. But then they fell into something, a sort of approximation of friendship, and he had been over a lot – entertaining Morgan, hanging out with Happy, helping Pepper make decisions about Tony's labs.

 

Morgan glanced up at her pinned arm. “It's been four months. Which means I'm two months away from being 17 and a half, which is _almost_ 18, which is an adult and no longer a kid,” she concluded proudly. She sounded like her father.

 

He sighed. “You're not ready. I wasn't then either.”

 

“ _So train me_!”

 

Peter took a deep breath, not thrilled to be having this discussion again. “As I've said before, your mom would kill me. Anyway, I can't train you on that suit. I don't know how to use it.”

 

“I know how to use the suit. I need practice fighting someone.”

 

“No. You might get hurt.”

 

“With you? I don't think so.”

 

“I can be very dangerous.”

 

“ _Uncle Peter_ , you wouldn't hurt a fly if you could avoid it.” She only called him “Uncle Peter” when she was making fun of him. He put her helmet back on and started walking away. “Are you going to let me out of this stuff?” she called out.

 

“No.”

 

“Spider-man!” she shouted. He didn't reply. “At least come over for dinner! We're having tacos!”

 

He kept an eye on her from a nearby rooftop, watching to see if she could figure a way out of her restraints. He could tell somehow from her body language that was thinking, not waiting. After 20 minutes and a couple of failed attempts, she managed to get the energy coming out of her hand to bounce off her helmet at the right angle to melt the web holding it in place. It took her a few minutes after that to completely disengage herself. There were plenty of people watching and offering to help, including the police, but she politely shooed them off so that she could do it herself.

 

Peter sighed again. He supposed the training had begun.

 

*/*/*

 

Peter actually had a rare date scheduled for that night – a blind date set-up by one of his colleagues at the Daily Bugle, a blind date he had not been particularly excited for - but he canceled it and made his way over to Pepper and Morgan's house, mostly because when Pepper took the time to cook she made really good tacos, or so he told Morgan. Morgan was at her computer in her room upstairs, going over archived news footage of Iron Man, looking for situations when he had been pinned and gotten out of it. Of course, there was really nothing comparable to the web, and Peter had only webbed Tony once: the first time they met. Tony had gotten out of it using the force of his personality, not his arc reactor or his weaponry.

 

Morgan, he already knew, had hundreds of videos of her father on a large hard drive. Peter asked her to show him some of the others, and before a minute had gone by he felt the pricking of tears in his eyes. He had gone introspective, thinking about Tony and how much Peter wished – everyday - that he was still here, when he was startled out of it by Morgan's sudden movement. She had jerked back in her desk chair and Peter followed her eyes to see that a spider had dropped down from the ceiling on a web, right between her face and the screen. Peter laughed, picked the spider up by its web and carried it over to the window, releasing it onto the roof.

 

“Friend of yours?” she asked, her eyes sparkling with amusement.

 

“You can't just assume all spiders know each other. That's racist.”

 

“Don't let our enemies find out that you're such a big softie.”

 

“I might be soft, but you're a wuss.”

 

“If I'm a wuss then so is Indiana Jones. He was afraid of snakes.” Peter had introduced Morgan to Indiana Jones and the two of them had watched the movies together several times.

 

“Snakes can be poisonous.”

 

“So can spiders! And they're creepy.”

 

“You think I'm creepy?”

 

“No,” she answered, and the way she said it, serious and intense and breathless, made him very uncomfortable. He was afraid if he stayed that he would have to hurt her feelings, but he was afraid that if he left he would embarrass her.

 

He turned back to the computer as a distraction and pointed to a thumbnail. “What's this one?”

 

He didn't realize it was the video message Tony had left for her before he went into the quantum realm. Morgan didn't hesitate to press play – she had obviously seen it a thousand times, and while it meant something to her, it didn't carry the same pain for her as it would have if she remembered him better. Which broke Peter's heart a little bit, on Tony's behalf. Tony didn't quite look himself – the video had been converted from a hologram and was a little distorted – but it was very intimate and Peter felt a desperate pang. “I'm hoping if you play this back, it's in celebration,” Tony said, and Peter felt a tear roll down his cheek. Even after all this time, he had a million tears left to cry for Tony Stark. They finished the rest of the video and then were surprised to see Pepper standing in Morgan's doorway. “Dinner's ready,” she announced softly, and Morgan ran off down the stairs.

 

Peter tried to brush away his tears before Pepper saw, but she had already noticed. “I'm sorry that you never got to know the kind of man Tony became after he was a father,” she said, politely looking away so that he could wipe his cheek in private. “But you started him down that path, he started to become that man because of you. The responsibility that you made him feel.”

 

_I liked him the way he was_ , Peter thought, a little bitterly. He had always felt like Pepper wanted Tony to change – not necessarily for the better, but to be what _she_ wanted. “He taught me so much. I'm still...a little lost without him.”

 

“Me too.”

 

Peter began to walk towards the door, but Pepper put out her arm to stop him. “You're really not going to tell me that she took the suit out today?”

 

He took a deep breath. “I was trying to find a way to inform you that wouldn't make her feel like I was going over her head to tattle on her.”

 

“Peter, she's _17_.”

 

“I know. I don't want her out there either. But I'm not sure she can be stopped.”

 

“I know you're talking about me!” Morgan yelled from downstairs.

 

Peter smiled to himself, but Pepper was still deadly serious. “That is my _child_. She's all I have.”

 

He exhaled heavily, and looked Pepper straight in the eyes. “I started doing this because I couldn't stand by while someone got hurt when I could do something about it. _When I could help_. It's the same for her.” Pepper darkened, but Peter pressed on: “I think it was the same for Tony, though you would know more about that than I would.”

 

“Yes, I would.”

 

Peter tried to be really respectful of how much longer Pepper had known Tony, the fact that they had been husband and wife and Peter had only ever been a mentee and friend for a couple of years. But it seemed to annoy Pepper, like his deference was only an act, or he was using it to hide something. Like it was patronizing. “She's good enough in that suit already that she knows she can help. And she's not just following Tony's example: she's following yours too. You kicked ass in that battle. I know, I saw it.”

 

Pepper was flattered in spite of herself. “Don't encourage her, Peter.”

 

“If she goes out there without training, doing it all on her own, it could get her killed. She's not going to stop. It makes her feel close to him, she's not going to let that go.”

 

Pepper blinked, distraught. “I am not OK with this.”

 

*/*/*

 

He hung out until Pepper sent him home because it was getting late. He and Morgan played Mario Kart, played cards while she told him about all the drama with her classmates, baked cookies, and briefly took out the canoe on the water at sunset while taking turns playing songs for each other. It was the best day he had had in as long as he could remember, and it wasn't the first time in recent years he had told himself that he needed to spend more time with Morgan and Pepper.

 

Those first few years after Tony was gone, Peter had found a lot of comfort in seeing Pepper and being at their house. It took time, but Morgan warmed to him and he eventually warmed to her too. She had been a very pleasant child - intelligent and engaging and funny - but getting over the hurdle of feeling like she had replaced him, of feeling like she was an interloper, had not been easy. But lately he had just been in that perpetual state of busy-ness that people in their 20s always were, or felt like they always were. He hadn't made time for them and he was regretting it. He had lost sight of what really mattered.

 


	17. Chapter 17

Having climbed up to the first floor roof, Peter tapped her window three times. He tried again, harder, but she still didn't stir. Then he used the spidery stick on his fingers to try to lift the glass, and fortunately it wasn't locked. “Pssst. Morgan.”

 

She jolted and then sighed with relief when she saw his face in the cracked window. “Peter?” she mumbled, confused. “What time is it?” She glanced at the clock, which read 3 AM in bright red letters.

 

“Hey, kiddo. I'm sorry I missed your birthday party.”

 

“It's OK,” she said, recovering from her disorientation, and running an embarrassed hand through her messy hair. “I saw the news. I know you were busy.”

 

“Well, I'm not OK with it. That's why I'm here.” He lifted up a cupcake on a plate for her to see, with a lit “18” candle in the middle that was almost as big as the cupcake itself.

 

“How did you get that up here?” she asked, laughing. She had tossed off her blankets and sat up against her headboard, and shadows in the faint moonlight danced across her throat and chest as a breeze blew through the tree behind him. He hadn't been ready to see her in nothing but a lacy camisole.

 

“That's no challenge for Spider-man!”

 

Morgan rose from her bed and opened the window all the way; Peter turned his head aside so as not to stare at her bare legs. He didn't climb inside, instead gesturing for her to join him on the roof, which she did, after slipping on some leggings. There was a slight flatness on the roof outside her window where they were able to sit for a moment. “You know I had enough cake to make me sick before I went to bed, right?”

 

“Yeah, I figured. That's why I got you the cinnamon one, since I thought you probably had vanilla or chocolate for your cake.”

 

She said softly, “I love cinnamon.”

 

“I know.” Peter lifted his eyebrows at her: “Well, make a wish.”

 

She didn't need to think about what her wish was going to be, and she blew out the candle quickly. As she reached for the cupcake, he said, “No. Come on,” and indicated the dock on the lake with a throw of his head. He scooped her up into his arms and jumped down off the roof with little discomfort to her and no destruction to the cupcake.

 

Once seated on the dock side-by-side, their feet dangling in the not-too-chilly water, they split the cinnamon cupcake. She leaned her head sleepily on his shoulder while they stared off at the pretty sliver moon. “You know I have school tomorrow, right?”

 

“You'll be fine. You're young. Whereas I can no longer do an all-nighter without accidentally walking – or swinging - into telephone poles the next day.”

 

“You're not that old, Peter,” she said intently, pulling away from him to look into his eyes. “We belong to the same generation, you know.”

 

“I used to think 30 was ancient.” Though that wasn't really true, was it? Tony had been in his 40s and Peter had never thought he was too old, or old at all, really.

 

“You're not 30 quite yet. And it's not ancient.” She reached up and brushed some of the hair that had fallen into his face out of the way, noticing that it had distracted his hyper-sensitive peripheral vision once or twice.

 

“No, it's not. But I thought you had to actually reach 30 to realize that everyone still feels like a kid and no one knows what they're doing.”

 

“Well, I'm wise beyond my years.” She winked, then flicked her eyes to him intently. “You have the power to make my birthday wish come true, you know?”

 

“Don't tell me what it is. You know the rules.”

 

She swallowed nervously. “Maybe you can guess.”

 

He chewed on his tongue, at least as nervous as she was, if not more so. His eyes followed a lock of her hair that had fallen between her breasts, highlighted as they were by the plunging neckline of her thin tank top. He jerked his gaze back up to her pretty face, but only noticed her shiny, slightly-parted lips and those damn eyes that reminded him of Tony so much, even after all these years of knowing Morgan. “Yeah, I think I can,” he whispered.

 

When Morgan was seven or eight, Pepper had told him, “I think she has a crush on you.” He had given her a bracelet as a gift – a silver chain with big purple flowers - and apparently won her heart as a result. He figured it had been temporary, but when Morgan was 15, Pepper had told him the same thing again. Maybe it was the same crush, maybe it was new one. He was apprehensive, but Pepper had said: “Relax, Peter: I trust you. I'm just warning you as a courtesy - I didn't want you to be blindsided. Don't break her heart. But don't let her down too easy or she'll think there's still a chance.” But Morgan had never made any kind of move, had never given him any indication, except a desire to spend more time with him. And now that it was finally happening, and she was all grown up, he wasn't so sure he wanted her to think that there wasn't a chance.

 

A few months ago they had all seen each other at a party at Happy and May's. (May and Pepper had remained good friends, and Pepper had hired May to her charities department.) Morgan had worn a backless red dress and Pepper had spotted him staring at her back, _at her_. Peter played it off like there had been a mosquito but he wasn't sure he had convinced Pepper – in fact he was almost certain he hadn't – and Morgan had been looking at him like he was crazy when he started swiping at her shoulder blades. He thought May had been suspicious too, making him wonder if he had been giving off more vibes than just that single incident.

 

 _Am I ever going to fall for someone and actually know that it's happening?_ , he wondered.

 

Because the red backless dress had caught him totally by surprise.

 

“I can guess,” he said to her. “But I can't do it.”

 

“You wouldn't want me to stop believing in magic, would you? I blew out the candle, so the wish should come true.”

 

“Magic is real,” he told her. “I've seen it. A sorcerer brought me through glowy yellow portal from another planet just by waving his hands around.”

 

She smiled, but the way she touched his arm told him she wasn't going to let him change the subject. He inhaled deeply, but didn't do anything, he just kept breathing, in and out, in and out, ponderously. Then he finally gave her nervous, hopeful, warm, familiar eyes one last look, and he leaned in and kissed her. He thought it would be harmless. She was 18, she wanted to be kissed on her birthday. It was just a midnight kiss by the lake.

 

But he knew by the end of it that it was dangerous.

 

Her happy, satisfied, relieved little exhale as their wet lips parted flushed him through with both love and desire. It had been a very simple kiss – no tongue, he hadn't lifted his hand to her face. That it could make him feel this... He wondered what it would feel like to do more – kiss her deeper; touch her neck, her cheek, her chest; ease her down onto the dock for more leverage.

 

Shit, shit shit.

 

He had kissed Tony's daughter, and he wanted to kiss her again.

 


	18. Chapter 18

He didn't sense her behind him, didn't notice anyone was there until the ear bud had already been pulled out. That wasn't the typical MO of an assailant, but his reflexes moved a lot faster than his thoughts did. He didn't have his web shooters on, he pinned her with his hands, one holding her wrists together above her head, another around her throat, and his body pressing hers to the ground with all of his supernatural strength. It would have been enough to stop any human, but he felt vulnerable all the same without his suit.

 

There was still the ghost of the smile that used to be on her face but it had mostly been wiped away by shock, and fear too. And a tiny bit of pain, he guessed, from him slamming her against the ground. (Thank God it was grass or her head might have really been hurt.)

 

They were both breathing heavily from surprise. He was slow to understand that she wasn't a threat, and even slower to recognize her. But when he dealt with life-and-death stakes all the time, that's what his body was trained to be ready for.

 

She was scared, then relieved, then regarding him with pity and concern. "It's me."

 

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Morgan, are you OK?"

 

"No, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have snuck up on you. I should have known better."

 

"It's not _your_ fault I'm so jumpy. Occupational hazard," he said, making a wry, apologetic face. Tony had warned him about what this kind of life would turn him into, how it would change him. Peter hadn't thought much of it at the time, but he saw it now. He should have listened more to Tony.

 

Peter's music was still blasting away in one ear. He had released his hold on her throat, but not yet her hands. They both seemed to realize in the same moment that he was on top of her and not making any effort to move. He had been sitting on the grass at the waterfront, and others in the park were starting to give them strange looks. She slipped one of her hands free from his relaxing vice grip and picked up the other ear bud, placing it in her ear. "Old Alt-J?" she identified with a teasing smile.

 

"Classic Alt-J."

 

"That means it's old."

 

Yeah, he used to think that too. Peter smiled at her: "You're a punk."

 

"At least it's not talk radio. Then you would really be a lost cause."

 

"So I'm almost a lost cause but not quite?"

 

"I like old Alt-J too." He feigned a dirty look and she corrected to "classic". Her eyes stressed her meaning: " _We like the same kind of music_.”

 

Peter finally backed off of her, dusting grass off his knees as he sat back down. She continued to lie there, arching her chest slightly towards him in a suggestive way, and tossing her hair to fan out behind her flatteringly. She wasn't the type of girl he ever would have thought of as ostentatiously sexy but she knew what she was doing when she wanted to be doing it. He was far from immune, but he was wary of her words. Her point was not lost on him and it made him nervous that they couldn't just be friends anymore, that she was always going to be pushing this agenda. "Was it a coincidence, you finding me here?"

 

"Not exactly."

 

"It's an invasion of my privacy for you to track the suit." It was sitting next to him, in his backpack. That was so Tony, to track the suit.

 

"You've been avoiding me. Since my birthday."

 

"What are you talking about? I always answer when you call." He said it with a straight face, but she didn't buy it for a second.

 

"I didn't want to talk to you on the phone: I wanted to see you." He didn't say anything. "Just-just tell me we're good," she begged.

 

"We're good."

 

"You had better mean that." She rolled her head so that she was facing up towards the sky. "You know, I'd rather hang out with you than do just about anything. Even if we're just watching dumb videos on YouTube or killing time waiting for our table. I think you ought to know that before you start making up your mind about where this thing is going."

 

She jingled her foot, and he looked down and saw that she was wearing the bracelet with the purple flowers that he had given her all those years ago.

 

When she sat up, their faces were inches apart. She leaned in slowly to kiss him, giving him plenty of time to stop her. He didn't.

 


	19. Chapter 19

It was after 11:30, but he wasn't asleep yet when he heard the knock. He switched off the TV and peeked through the peephole.

 

Morgan.

 

He was worried about why she was there, but she didn't look seductive, just upset. He opened the door quickly to her. “Are you OK?”

 

She made an utterance of frustration as she walked in. “Mom and I had a fight. She's trying to keep the suit from me. She changed all the passwords, I can't get anywhere near it.”

 

Peter closed the door. “She'll get over it.” Morgan had been training on Pepper's the iron suit for almost a year now, and she and Peter had spent a lot of time drilling and preparing her. But the first time he had taken her out on an actual mission – after much campaigning - she had wound up with a broken collarbone.

 

“You're more confident of that than I am.”

 

“You're an adult now. She knows she shouldn't keep you from your...well, it's your birthright.”

 

“What do you think my dad would have wanted?” she asked, turning to him. Uncertain.

 

Peter had spent a lot of time wondering the same thing. He wanted to do right with Tony. Peter thought about how protective Tony had been, had angry he had been when Peter had snuck aboard the spaceship to help him. But... “He would have wanted you to be able to take care of yourself.”

 

“That's good. I should write that down.”

 

“Does your mom know you're here?”

 

She repeated him again in a mocking tone, giving him a slight smile and then reverting to her irritation. “None of her business. I'm 18 now.” Peter lifted his brow. “Yes, I told her,” Morgan conceded. “I said I was staying here.” She didn't miss his alarm, as he questioned to himself what Pepper would make of that, and whether she would wonder if it had happened before.

 

Peter ran a hand through his hair. “I'm not so sure that's a good idea.”

 

She smiled back at him like she thought he was flirting, and he supposed he had given a little too much away by admitting that he wasn't sure they could just be platonic roommates for the night. (Though how much was honestly going to happen while her collarbone was broken?) Is this what Tony had felt like with him? Scared and excited and guilty and a million different buzzing things. He was starting to regret not showering as she stepped closer to him. “What if I promise not to pull any stunts like I did on my birthday?”

 

“Deal,” he agreed quickly, before she took back the offer. He already knew there was no way he was going to be kicking her out.

 

He went down the hall to grab some sheets and blankets out of the closet. When he came back into the living room, she was reading a letter. One of the copies of his letter from Tony, the one he kept in the drawer by his desk. He stared at her while she read it – she knew he was there, but she didn't stop. Then, finally, she looked up. “Sorry, I was looking for a charger for my phone.” Her words were steady and honest, but she was clearly a little shaken by the letter. She held it up: “You never told me about this.” He shook his head, dismissing it like it was nothing. It _was_ nothing – paternal, affectionate, but nothing. “Mom told me he had taken you under his wing. And I remembered him calling you “Uncle Peter”. But... He really loved you, didn't he?” Peter wasn't sure how to answer her. “He says he did it for you. Went back to the Avengers, went back in time.”

 

“He's exaggerating.”

 

“Did he die for you too?” she asked quietly.

 

“You used to think that he did when you were little. You hated me.”

 

“Did he?”

 

“When your dad picked up that gauntlet with the stones in it, everything was on the line. _Everyone_.”

 

She waved the letter again. “This is a copy. Where's the original.”

 

He admitted, after a long pause: “Safety deposit box.”

 

Morgan sat on the couch, she folded her legs under her. “Happy and Rhodey and Mom always talked about you and my dad like it was father/son relationship. And how you took after him. But it wasn't, was it?” She couldn't have gotten that just from the letter. She was reading into something else too.

 

Peter regarded her warily. “No, it was. He definitely answered me with 'Because I said so' at least once. It was and it wasn't. A relationship can be a lot of different things. Even conflicting things.”

 

“Was it an affair?” There wasn't accusation in her tone, just curiosity.

 

Peter felt himself blushing and tried to back into the shadows of the hallway a little bit so that she wouldn't be able to tell. “No.” She lifted her eyebrows – she wanted more details. “Your dad _never_ betrayed your mom.”

 

“That's not why I'm asking.”

 

“I hero-worshipped him, maybe...maybe it was closer to a crush than anything else. I loved him like a-like a- _I don't know_. I don't know. But what your dad felt back was always exactly what it should have been.”

 

“Are you sure about that?” Peter wasn't sure about that at all. It was one of the great mysteries of his life.

 

“It was intense,” Peter admitted. “You can see that by what we both went through, when he lost me, when I lost him. When he died, I felt like I had lost a dad. And I had lost a best friend. And a brother. And a mentor. And everything he was to me. I think we both wanted it to be a little bit more than what it would have been if we let it stay in some neat little box of what was normal and expected.”

 

She was satisfied with his answer, and she touched his hand in a loving way when she gave him the letter back as he came to sit next to her. “Mom always talked about how much fun he had with you,” she said. “I think she resented that. It sounds like she was always trying to rein in his behavior, being hard on him, and with you he just got to be himself.”

 

“I think he was only the man I knew and admired – and _loved_ – because he needed someone like your mom, and she was there for him.”

 

“...Do you think you could ever need me like that?”

 

Peter's mind, adrift on thoughts of Tony, sharply focused back in on Morgan and her pleading, uncertain voice. “Morgan...”

 

“I love you.”

 

“You said no stunts,” he accused, scooting back a little bit.

 

She looked hurt. “It's not a stunt.”

 

“I'm 11 years older than you! You're still a kid. You haven't even been to college yet.”

 

“I've known you almost my whole life. There's no one I trust more than you. I don't see what difference your age makes.” Was he being a hypocrite? He had been in her position once. Almost, sort of. He would have said something very similar. Was Peter making all the mistakes Tony avoided, or seizing what Tony had lost out on? “Maybe it's a biggish gap now, but it won't matter much in a decade, and come on, it's not _huge_. Didn't Thor date some Earth scientist? She would have been like a _thousand_ years younger than him.” She had a point. “And I'm starting college in two months. I'm going to Columbia, I'll be right here in New York City. I'll be closer to your apartment when I'm there than where I live right now.”

 

“After all that we just talked about with your dad, aren't you afraid I'm only-”

 

“I don't care.”

 

He shook his head at her. “You should.” Peter knew, he _knew_ there were no clean lines here, just one big Stark blur.

 

“I know what I want, and I'll take it any way I can get it. And I know what I felt when you kissed me.” Her eyes challenged him, and her remark momentarily shut him up. “Is there something you want to tell me? Are you only interested because of what you felt for Tony Stark? Is that what you're trying to say?”

 

Peter touched her hair, and then his hand slid down so that he was palming her cheek. “No.” He sighed. “But I also can't entirely disentangle you from him. And I'm not sure that's fair to you.”

 

“Well, that's up to me. And like I said, I'll take it.”

 


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the final chapter. Thank you so much to all my readers! And to those who have been with me since Chapter 1 - I'm sorry this took so long!
> 
> If there really is no Disney/Sony deal and we never get Tom Holland as Spider-man again I have to admit I'll be pleased with how Tony-centric Peter's entire MCU arc was, even if there's plenty to be sad about.

Pepper did eventually relent, and Morgan was allowed to resume her training once she was all healed up. Morgan temporarily accepted, with some grumbling, her mother's pronouncement that she wasn't quite ready for the “real thing” yet. And Pepper was worried she might end up neglecting her studies if she dove in too hard. Peter was relieved that Pepper had to be the bad guy, and he got to be the sympathetic shoulder, because he had been thinking the same thing. He'd nearly killed the guy who hurt her; Peter had read later that his arm had to be amputated. And as for neglecting studies, Peter was himself the cautionary tale.

 

Peter knew Pepper had decided to take a more involved role in preparing her, but if he had known Pepper was going to show up on that particular day, he wouldn't have caught a flying Morgan in his web and pulled her down to kiss her. Morgan was laughing hysterically as she tried first to fly away and strain the web until it broke (it didn't), and then to shoot it off. But he he was using it to swing her back and forth, and then to reel her in like a fish, and by the time she was only a few feet away from him, she was no longer trying to escape. She extinguished her jets and fell hard on top of him with a thud, which caused him to groan and dropped them both to the ground.

 

When she removed her helmet she was still laughing. “You were supposed to be trying to get away,” he scolded.

 

“I didn't want to get away.”

 

He removed his own mask and kissed her, wrapping his arm around her to hold hot metal and working his other hand aggressively up into her hair.

 

They had already begun to pull away and climb to their feet when Pepper cleared her throat. Morgan's jaw dropped and she stared at her mother with the widest eyes he had ever seen. Peter had the great benefit of facing the other direction. He scrunched up his face in a deep wince and then took a hard breath and swung around to face her. “Hi, Pepper.”

 

“Well, I'm not exactly surprised. But I can't say I'm not disappointed.”

 

“Mom,” Morgan began, but she didn't have anything ready to say after that, and it just flopped.

 

“Go inside, Morgan. I need to talk to your 'Uncle Peter'.”

 

Morgan gave him a hesitant look, but Peter nodded at her and she went. He trudged slowly over to Pepper, feeling a lot more like the kid he used to be when Tony was alive than he had in a while. “So. I see you're determined that I must share everything with you. First Tony, then Happy marries your aunt. Now Morgan.” She sighed. “How long has this been going on?”

 

“It hasn't been 'going on',” he defended animatedly. “I swear, Pepper.”

 

“So what I saw just now, that was your first kiss?” She crossed her arms skeptically.

 

“Well, no. OK, you're right about that. But that's all it's been. Just a couple of kisses. A-a handful.” He cleared his throat nervously.

 

She studied him with penetrating eyes. “At least you waited until she finished high school.” He didn't miss her condemning tone.

 

“It wasn't like that.” He showed her that he was offended, and she relaxed her glare.

 

Pepper leaned in towards him a little, and said with sympathy, “If you're with her because she makes you feel close to him, you're with her for the wrong reasons.”

 

“She does make me feel close to him,” he replied thoughtfully. “I miss him so much, and she makes it better. But I would never be with her if I couldn't love her the way she deserves.”

 

“I'm her mother. I'm the only one who is ever going to love her the way she deserves,” Pepper answered him, and he heard all the old jealousies and resentments in her voice.

 

He held his hand up in concession. “No, you're right.”

 

“I still think of you as that teenager I met. I know if Tony was still here, he would still be calling you 'kid'. But you're you're 30 now, _she's only 18_.”

 

“She's mature for her age.” Pepper rolled her eyes, but it was true. “She and I know each other pretty well. There aren't going to be any big surprises.” He added: “Morgan also made a very good point about Thor. Did you know that-”

 

Pepper ignored him. “...And I don't want her to lose her husband the way I lost mine.”

 

His eyes doubled in size. “Whoa! Wait just a minute. Hold those horses. No one is talking about marriage.”

 

“I've given you the benefit of not knowing for sure and assumed you're serious about her. I know you wouldn't be trifling with an eighteen year-old niece-figure, you wouldn't be throwing away your relationship with her or our family just because you're horny or lonely.”

 

After wincing at the word “horny”, he stood tall, defiant. “No, I wouldn't.”

 

“Caring about her while also being attracted to her is not the same as the kind of love and commitment involved in a marriage, whether there's an actual wedding anytime soon or not. (And I pray not.) Are you sure you know the difference?”

 

Peter was starting to grow a little annoyed with Pepper's lecturing, like she thought he hadn't spent any time thinking about this, when it was _all_ he had been thinking about for months. Was he too old and experienced for her, or did he not know what he was doing? She couldn't have it both ways. “Pepper, this is the first time I've ever felt like it might actually be possible for me to be happy with someone. I've been bouncing around, listless and alone, for so long. Nothing has ever... _worked_ or felt right. But this, with her – it does.” She considered this, the part of her that cared about him momentarily taking over. “I think that she and I could make each other really happy. We-we already do.”

 

“I would like that, Peter. Really I would. But it's an awfully big risk.”

 

“It doesn't feel that risky to me,” he said, smiling to himself as he thought about Morgan. Pepper studied him, and sighed in a surrendering way. “What do you think Tony would have thought about it?” he asked her, anxious.

 

He had spent so much time wondering if Tony would have approved. ...What if he wouldn't have? Peter couldn't bear the thought; he still didn't want to disappoint him. Was he lying to himself, thinking Tony would have been thrilled? Would any father want his eighteen year-old daughter dating a hero-type twelve years her senior? But Tony had loved him, and if Tony could see how happy Peter was determined to make Morgan, what good care he was going to take of her, he would have had to have been pleased about it, right?

 

“He would have been jealous,” Pepper replied with a meaningful look. “And happy.” Then she walked away. Jealous that Peter had found his own Pepper? Or jealous that his daughter had another man in her life? Both? Peter felt that this had been a major concession from Pepper and he promised himself that he would honor it.

 

As he slowly approached, he saw that Pepper and Morgan had only a short discussion and hadn't needed the time he was trying to give them. Perhaps they had already exhausted the topic on another occasion.

 

Morgan ran out to him, arms wide and a smile on her face. He caught her and kissed her, and he thought of what Tony had said in his goodbye video: “Everybody wants a happy ending, right? But it doesn't always roll that way. Maybe this time.”

 

It would never be a happy ending without him. But maybe it could be happy enough.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> I haven't seen the Iron Man movies in quite a while so if you notice any errors or contradictions - and that applies to the other movies as well - please do let me know. Because I want this to be perfectly canon compliant.


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